


Light Me Up (Or the one where Erin has anxiety during a power outage)

by Allyjayrunaway



Series: Light Me Up [1]
Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Candles, F/F, angsty fluff, anxiety mentions, gay piggyback rides, this fic has it all i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 03:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 35,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7960837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allyjayrunaway/pseuds/Allyjayrunaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The seconds crawl by like hours and nothing changes. The darkness consumes everything and she can’t even see her own hand in front of her face. She slowly crumples to the ground, shock like white noise deadening each of her limbs until she’s barely sitting upright.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I see you in my fireflies

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, y'all, this has been in the works for like a month now, but I gotta let it be free.  
> Thank you to my gorgeous beta, tumblr user @mugglebellisario: You're still my hero.  
> Hope y'all enjoy, part two is coming in hot. 
> 
> Oh, and if you haven't heard the song, it's Light Me Up by Ingrid Michaelson, for the love of GOd give it a listen.

                It’s pretty normal for Holtzmann to be the last one standing at the Ghostbusters HQ, especially when she’s in the midst of developing new tech for her colleagues to make use of, so when the clock hits 3 am, she’s not particularly surprised. However, she is a little startled when, 15 minutes later, there’s a sharp crackling sound, followed by the shock of utter silence as the lights over head flicker and die, plunging the lab into complete darkness. She can’t help but let out a bark of laughter, more at the shock of it than in actual humor, before she drops her blowtorch onto the workbench below and flicks the flashlight on her phone into existence. Stumbling toward the fuse panel on the wall next to the door and cursing a little when she stubs her toe on the industrial toaster she’d been building, she’s convinced that she’s finally exceeded the output capabilities of the admittedly dated firehouse. It’s not until a massive clap of thunder shatters her train of thought that she realizes what actually happened.

                The firehouse, it would seem, had been struck by lightning. This time her cackle is filled with mirth…and a little relief that the surge of power wasn’t enough to overload any of the more _volatile_ devices in her repertoire. But, as she is woefully aware, genius halts for no storm. Her wimpy phone light is barely strong enough to cut through the gloom to provide her a clear path, much less allow her to safely continue building a hollow-laser powered proton net, so she heads out into the hall in search of more illumination. She’s halfway down the stairs before she realizes that the backup generator should have kicked in by now. Maybe go check that first.

 

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

                The first thought in Erin’s mind is that she can no longer see the whiteboard in front of her and she wonders if she’s fallen asleep at her desk again. Her second thought is that Holtz blew another fuse and the lights would be back on in short order. But the seconds crawl by like hours and nothing changes. The darkness consumes everything and she can’t even see her own hand in front of her face.

 

                                Oh _no_.

 

She slowly crumples to the ground, shock like white noise deadening each of her limbs until she’s barely sitting upright.

 

                                _No no no no_.

 

She’s eight years old and hiding under the covers again.

 

She’s begging her parents for a nightlight for her ninth birthday.

 

She’s too old for that and they refuse to enable her delusions anymore.

 

She’s crying, pleading with the old woman to leave her alone, find someone else to haunt, just _please_

 

                                “ _GO AWAY!”_

She’s screaming at an apparition that hovers at the foot of her bed until her parents come in, flickering out of existence with an evil smirk just as the door handle begins to turn, the faintest whisper taunting her every waking moment… _they’ll never believe you…_

                “Erin? Are you still here? I thought you went home…” Holtzmann’s voice flutters into the room from the hallway. “I checked the backup gennie, we’re out of juice.”

                The floating pinprick of light startles her but offers no relief. It’s too similar to the way the ghost’s eyes would pulsate in the darkness before the skin of her face melted away, leaving nothing but a gleaming skull, grinning hellishly into the night.

 

                                _They’ll never believe you._

                Erin whimpers as the light bobs closer, the logical part of her mind telling her that it’s just Holtzmann with a flashlight because the bobbing matches the unique cadence of the engineer’s gait, but that small, hollow voice is quickly drowned out by a screaming maelstrom of childlike terror that slashes reality to ribbons.

 

                “I think Kevin has room for another member on his hide-and-go-seek team, if that’s what you’re going for over here.” The light stops, hovers for another half a second and Erin can’t pull her gaze away. She knows what’s comeing next.

                The light inverts itself to shine directly on Holtzmann’s face, all gleaming goggles and sinister toothy smile, and it’s more than Erin can take. She folds in on herself involuntarily, eyes clamped shut and hands shooting up to block out the deafening roar in her ears as she hyperventilates.

 

                “Okayyy…so it’s definitely not time for scary stories, I take it…” Holtzmann mutters more to herself than to Erin, quieting when Erin begins to knock back against the desk.

 

                “ _There’s no such thing as ghosts. There’s no such thing as ghosts. There’s no such thing as ghosts_.”

 

It had been her personal mantra for years, something to reassure her parents and the therapist, something to shout defiantly when she saw the telltale flashes of blue in the middle of the night. Something to fall back on when she was reliving her own worst nightmare.

                Listening raptly to Erin’s gasping and fervent repetition, Holtz can’t help but make one dry observation: “You are aware that you are a member of the Ghost _Busters_ , are you not?”

                Erin only breathes harder, fighting to grab onto one wispy atom of oxygen before her traitorous lungs send them hurtling back out. The words stumble out more slowly, bent and broken and fewer at a time. She knows, somewhere in the warzone that is her mind, that if she could see anything, it would be purple blotches floating in her periphery, and she feels relief flood through her. She’s about to pass out. Passing out means oblivion, it always has. When she wakes up, the ghost will be gone and there will be light.

 

                “Erin, honey, you’ve gotta calm down. I can’t help you if you pass out on me, Sweetcheeks.” Erin tries to shake her head, to communicate that it’s okay. Passing out is preferable. But then Holtzmann is shining that god-awful light onto her and she’s tumbling back down again. Fresh adrenaline floods through her veins, heightening her senses until her own breathing sounds like a waterfall and she swears she can feel the air abrading her skin. 

 

                “ _Light_ …” She gasps, pouring every ounce of focus and will into spitting that one syllable out into the open. Holtzmann, for all her sideways thinking, doesn’t understand.

 

                “Erin, this is light. If you gimme a sec, I can go find us a real flashlight.” The words are softer than she’s used to hearing from Holtz, but the frustration of being misunderstood only serves to add to the nervous energy currently tearing its way through her fragile being.

 

                “ _Too harsh_ …” She pauses as another jagged icicle of air floods her lungs. She can physically feel the question emanating from the void where Holtz should be, and she wracks her mind for a way to get the message across.

 “ _Candle!”_ Her fingers and toes are going numb, but it’s hard to tell if it’s the panic or lack of oxygen at fault. In an instant, the light brushing of fingertips on her thigh is gone and she lets out a cry of loss. She’s alone with the ghost in her mind and not even Holtz can help her.

 

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

                It takes Holtzmann what seems like an hour to get to the kitchen, but in reality is probably more along the lines of a few seconds; however, she’s running on panic time and it’s already been too long. She shouldn’t have left her there, not alone; she should have carried her out fireman style to…to where? The whole firehouse was down and she wasn’t strong enough to carry her to the roof. Plus, they’d probably get struck by lightning. Or get pneumonia. Or something.

 

                                _Taking too long taking too long taking too long wait there it is._

                To celebrate their ascent to acceptance and also the HQ upgrade, Patty had baked a cake and Abby had really gone all out on the decorations. Holtz remembers at least three separate boxes of birthday candles in the cabinet next to the microwave. Or was it the drawer underneath?

 

                                _Taking too long taking too long taking too long oh my god where are they wait there they are do I have my lighter what kind of question is that??_

 

                Grabbing the small box with her left hand and digging furiously for her lighter with the other, Holtzmann runs back to the squad room like she’s never run in her life. Upon arrival, she notices that Erin’s breathing has quieted considerably, and a pang of worry flashes through her chest. Upon further tactile inspection, the box she’s holding doesn’t quite feel as it should when she opens it. She reaches in to find a small cylinder that is pretty much the opposite of what she was expecting and her stomach sinks to her toes. Wincing as she turns on her flashlight and hears a sharp whine coming from beneath Erin’s desk, she prays she hasn’t made a monumental mistake.

                Instead of a traditional pack of birthday candles, she’s grabbed something better. They’re those little self-contained filler candles, tiny round things that can burn for hours. There’s about twenty of them in the package and she feels a gargantuan smile break out onto her face.

                “Aw _fuck_ yeah!” She quickly lights the one in her hand and skids to a stop in front of Erin before setting the small flame on the floor, for once careful not to set anything on fire. Holtzmann lights four more with a skill only an arsonist should have before she can begin to make out Erin’s face. What she does see sends icy shivers down her spine. Erin’s eyes are screwed shut so tight it must be painful, but this does nothing to prevent the absolute _torrent_ of tears winding in rivulets over her delicate cheeks. Her face is so pale that she almost resembles a ghost herself, and Holtzmann can feel the sobs that wrack her fragile frame from where she is sitting. Pausing to light a few more candles, Holtz feels the first of her own tears break free. How did she not know? She prided herself on being observant, but how could she not have seen it until now? The way Erin was always the most enthusiastic after a successful bust, or even the way she was the most ferocious during…And it explained what had happened when Heiss had walked in all high and mighty. But this? This was a level Holtzmann hadn’t even known existed. She slowly hooked a finger through Erin’s own pinky and tugged her hand away from her ear.

 

              “Hey. Babe, I need you to open your eyes for me, okay?” Erin shook her head vehemently. She knew what she was going to see if she did, and she couldn’t handle it again. “Erin, it’s me. Jillian Holtzmann, cohost of NPR’s ‘Take Two’. I know it was super dark in here, but now we got some sweet candles in this here equation, and honestly, it’s bordering on ‘romantically disgusting’, so if you could just open your eyes, love, I’m right here. It’s over, I got you light.” The shudders running the length of Erin’s body settle down to slight tremors, and she’s relaxed her hands enough that Holtzmann could intertwine their fingers without personal risk of injury. “That’s it, come on babe. Take a nice deep breath for me alright?” Erin takes a breath: in for four, out for eight. Just like her therapist taught her.

               And she opens her eyes.

 

             “Nice of you to join us here at New York’s smallest Christmas Mass. Granted, it’s not Christmas and, as far as I know, neither of us is Catholic, but we’ll make it work.” Holtz is gazing at her so earnestly and there’s such genuine concern in her crystal blue eyes that Erin can’t help but explode into another flood of tears.

              Holtzmann begins mentally preparing another lengthy monologue of a soothing nature, but before she can get a word in, Erin has disentangled their hands and thrown her arms around Holtz’s neck. She is momentarily stymied by the sudden invasion of her space; as comfortable as she is doing it to other people, they don’t reciprocate nearly as often, but the warmth of Erin’s breath in the crook of her neck, and the sensation of being melted into aren’t things she can ignore. Residual tears slide onto her shoulder and her heart breaks for a little girl whose only wish was to be seen.

              After what feels like an eternity, Erin pulls back. Holtzmann instantly misses the delicate brush of Erin’s lips against the skin of her neck and her heart does this weird flip-flop when Erin keeps her hand resting on Holtz’s arm, as if she can’t bear to lose contact entirely.

 

“Erin-“

 

“I was 8, and all I wanted was for my birthday was a nightlight.” Her voice barely cuts through the twelve inches of space between them, and it’s so hollow you could walk through it. Holtzmann waits for more, but none seems to be forthcoming so she pushes a bit.

 

“Tell me what happened. Please.” Tears reappear in Erin’s eyes as she stares at the plethora of tiny flames dancing through the darkness.

 

“They said I was too old. And when I kept begging they told me that…” Erin pauses, hitching up her shoulders into what she thinks might be an authoritative stance, and adopting a gruffer tone. “’We just can’t continue to enable these delusions anymore. It’s time to grow up.’ The therapy started a week later and stopped when I got to MIT.”

Holtzmann is having trouble deciphering the various emotions that are zooming through her mind: there’s a sense of abject horror at the whole fucked up situation, and a deep underlying affection for the woman absentmindedly stroking her forearm, but blanketing it all is this red, burning sensation blossoming to shroud everything else. It’s a feeling she latently recognizes as rage. She’s mildly surprised to find that she’s absolutely livid. At her parents. At the ghost. At a world that seems so intent on blotting out the brilliant spark that is Erin Gilbert. Holtz subconsciously clenches her fists and Erin can sense the change taking place in Holtzmann’s mood. Panic grips her, telling her she’s done something to upset the engineer.

 

“Holtz?” Her voice is small and uncertain, and she visibly starts when Holtzmann explodes.

 

“This is so _exponentially fucked UP_.” She’s breathing hard, and she almost convinces herself that it’s got nothing to do with the flush that’s slowly creeping into Erin’s cheeks. “To date,“ She continues more quietly. “I have only ever truly hated two people in this world, and one of them was me. But now I think I have to add two more to that list.” Erin has this look on her face that might resemble adoration, and Holtzmann reminds herself that she’s here to make things better, as impossible as that task seems. “Hey, can we try something?” Erin looks a little startled at the change of pace but quickly remembers with whom she is speaking and nods hesitantly, head bobbing forward in a distinctly bird-like motion.

 

“Five things you can see. Go.” It sounds more like an order than the game she had wanted it to be but it seems to snap Erin out of it a little, so she’ll take it.

 

“Umm…Candles…and the floor, and hands, and my desk…and _you_.” The last word escapes on a whisper and Holtz deliberately tries to ignore the way there doesn’t seem to be enough oxygen in the room, so she gives her next order.

 

“Four things you can touch.” Erin can’t tear her away Holtzmann’s face, the ever present goggles now curiously missing, and it’s a little too much to handle at the moment, so she shifts quietly until she’s laying in the fetal position, head resting on Holtz’s thigh. She’s glad she had changed into sweats before the power went out. A shaky hand comes up to worry the collar of her sweater as she speaks slowly.

 

“Tile.” Referring to the floor beneath her. “Tiny bow tie.” It’s hanging off her desk from earlier when she’d gotten frustrated at her latest equation, and Holtzmann snorts when she takes it between her fingers, a tremor that Erin can feel as it rolls through her. She kicks a foot out a little until it strikes the leg of her desk. “My desk, which is cold and metal because you lit the other one on fire.” Holtz continues to chuckle, while Erin pauses, feeling a different kind of tension filling the air around her. Holtzmann can’t help herself as she lowers a gentle hand to Erin’s shoulder, brushing light fingers through auburn hair. _Seriously, how is her hair this soft?_ Her thought is interrupted when Erin sighs slowly, rigid shoulders melting into the sensation. “You.”

 

“Three things you can hear.”

 

“Flames buzzing. Thunder rumbling.” She starts slightly as the crackling seems to boom in from every direction. Holtz steadies the hand in her hair and she calms again. Moments trickle by as the gentle sound of breathing filters in between the sharp cracks and distant tolling of the sky waging war with itself. Finally, a small smile wins out and floats across her lips. “You.”

 

 “Two things you can smell.” Holtz has long since stopped fighting the rush of adrenaline flooding through her at the low sound of Erin’s voice.

 

“Engine oil.” Erin says smoothly, as if she’s had time to prepare this answer; almost as if she’s already been thinking about it. Holtz cuts in,

 

“Sorry.” A sheepish grin fixes itself firmly onto her face, despite the fact that Erin is facing away. She can hear it in Holtzmann’s voice though.

 

“And cinnamon.” Erin sighs contentedly, and really she wouldn’t mind if she had to inhale that heady mixture until the end of time.

 

“Uh…also sorry?” It’s Holtz’s favorite cologne, a spicy scent that would invade her senses every time her grandfather taught her how to strip wires or solder or rewire circuitry. It’s one of the few mementos she keeps from a period of time when there was one person who truly understood her. Deciding to forego further apologies, she soldiers on. “One thing you can taste.”

This pause feels thoughtful, and the soft candle light seems to be bolstering Erin’s courage, as if nothing that happens in this quiet moment could ever come back to hurt her. She slowly reaches up to take the hand not currently entangled in her hair and, ever so slowly, brings Holtzmann’s palm to her lips.

The gentle brush feels like frostbite and chemical burn, ice flowing through her veins followed by a gentle burning warmth and Holtz is so caught up in the moment that she almost misses the near-silent whisper. “ _You_.”

The following silence that fills the air is neither oppressive nor light, and for all her usual hyperactivity, Holtz has never been this still, never been so paralyzed by the force of her connection to another human. Time ticks away into the stormy night, but whether it’s hours or minutes that have passed, Erin can’t tell.

 

“Holtz?” The sound of her voice is almost startling after an eternity of quiet, the only other sound the rain falling on the roof three stories above.

 

“Hmm?”

 

“How do you know all that?” She’s finally calm enough to actually feel the need to know everything about Holtzmann burning low in her chest.

 

“You weren’t the only one in therapy, Ghost Girl.” Erin can feel the smile underlying her words and she feels a gooey warmth spread through her limbs at the use of the nickname, the first time those words haven’t inspired nausea and a cold sweat, and she comes dangerously close to tears.

 

“Tell me about it?” She tries to phrase it cautiously, tries to convey the love that inspired her curiosity. Holtzmann chuckles easily and Erin feels the bubble of panic dissipate.

 

“As you may have noticed, I’ve got a touch of the old ADHD-“ She pauses as Erin laughs. “And college was like taking a deep breath for the first time. I -uh-basically lived in Gorin’s lab my whole first semester, and I may or may not have had a teensy-weensy incident with a very long week and no food, and I landed my first long-term gig in the hospital. I weighed 90 pounds when they brought me in, and part of my deal with Rebecca after they let me out was that I had to attend counseling twice a week. It was just…everything outside of the lab seemed so irrelevant and it took, um, a lot to figure out how to-uh- balance things. It’s still hard to do.” Holtz freezes when she feels the tension return to Erin’s shoulders and she fears that she’s revealed too much, too soon.

 

“That’s awful, Holtz. I’m so sorry.” It takes a minute for Erin’s words to sink in, and another for Holtz to register the disbelief running through her mind. Erin had it bad. Erin had shitty parents and a personal poltergeist and none of it was her own fault. But here she was apologizing for something Holtz had done to herself.

 

“Erin…it was _my_ fault… She trails off when Erin rolls over to look her directly in the eye; there’s something hard in that look that’s got Holtz a little bit terrified.

 

“ _Jillian Holtzmann_ , listen to me.” _Ho boy_. There’s a razor sharp edge to her voice that Holtz hasn’t heard before, and she’s legitimately panicking in a way that has nothing to do with feelings and self-preservation. “ _It’s not your fault_.” The conviction in Erin’s words slices her to the core, and not for the first time that night, she feels tears crowding over her lashes. “It took me a long time to convince myself of that, and I swear to God I will use all my skills on you. You had a legitimate problem, and that will _never. Be. Your. Fault_.” There’s a fire burning in Erin’s eyes as she gazes into Holtzmann’s and this must be what falling in love feels like. She’s raw but it feels good and she’s got this desperate feeling that there’s nothing she wouldn’t do to give Erin the world on a silver string and it’s overwhelming. Something she’s never felt before. Just as she’s about to try to verbalize this soul-rending realization, Erin yawns, comically long and hard, and Holtz can’t stop the snort that escapes her.

 

“Looks like it’s bedtime, Gilbert.” She starts to stand, intending to make her way to the ratty mattress in the corner of the lab, but firm fingers claw her back to the floor. Erin doesn’t even realize that she’s digging into Holtzmann’s forearm until the engineer places a light hand over her own and coaxes delicate finger up to intertwine with rough, callused ones. “I stand corrected.” Erin blinks rapidly, mortified.

 

“Oh my god, Holtz, I’m so sorry!” Her voice is thick and Holtz will be damned if she’s gonna let Erin cry again tonight.

 

“Hey, hey, we’re okay.” She tries to use her most soothing voice, placing a soft kiss to Erin’s knuckles in punctuation. “What do you need me to do, babe?”

Erin has never been asked this question before. No one has ever cared enough to ask outright, not even Abby. She struggles to stutter a reply.

 

“I don’t-I can’t-It’s dark.” She finished lamely, feeling her spirits sink as she avoids looking at Holtzmann’s face. She hates feeling weak in front of people. She’s felt weak all her life and has gone to extreme lengths to make sure she never breaks down in front of others, but her it is creeping right back in. Holtz seems to notice this, and she grins reassuringly before lifting Erin’s chin with her free hand.

 

“Fret not, fair maiden, for _I_ have a _plan_.” Erin has seen this look on Holtzmann’s face before, the instant before a major breakthrough, and she instantly feels simultaneously safer and more concerned.

 

“Here’s what were gonna do: I still have ten candles left in this box, and we’re gonna need all of ‘em.” Erin watches her raptly, unable to look away in the face of possible salvation. Slowly Holtzmann coaxes her into a standing position before gingerly reaching down to pluck the lit candles one by one from their places on the ground and setting them on top of Erin’s desk, careful not to spill wax on any of the notes littering the surface. She quickly lights the remaining ten, once again displaying her arsonistic skillset, before turning to face a noticeably nervous Erin. Fixing her with a devious smile, Holtz quirks an eyebrow and asks, “How do you feel about piggy-back rides?”

In the bolstered light of ten extra flames, she can clearly see Erin’s questioning look and she has to forcibly squelch a cackle.

 

“Here’s the conundrum: we need to get to the kitchen for more ammo,” Gesturing to the candles. “but we can’t do it in the dark, so here’s what I’m thinking.”

 

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

                By the time Holtz is done explaining the plan, Erin thinks that she might be dreaming. Except nothing in her own mind could come up with something so perfectly _Holtzmann._  So when Holtz gives the word, Erin clambers onto her back and holds out her hands to receive the first candles.

 

                “Okay, go.” She says through a smile, and Holtz jogs away from their little oasis of light and into the piercing darkness. As per Holtzmann’s instruction, Erin keeps her eyes glued to the dancing flames as they move along, until they’re just out of the larger pool of light.

 

                “Candle.” Holtz barks, as though demanding a scalpel to perform a lifesaving procedure. And maybe, in a way she is.

                Erin places the small oval into Holtzmann’s outstretched palm and watches as it’s lowered to the ground. They move another few feet forward and repeat the maneuver before turning and hightailing it back to their stash. After the tenth candle is placed and they begin yet another trek back down the hallway, Erin’s eyes tracking candle after candle like a moth drawn to a well- _flame_ , Holtz can’t help but make the observation that this operation bears a striking resemblance to Busting. She’s carrying a Very Important on her back and there’s a common theme of chasing ghosts, although this time around, they’re ghosts of the past. Time passes in slow motion, and as they finally lower the last candle into the kitchen, Holtz feels like she’s completed a marathon in record time.

 

                “Alright, Yoda.” She says in a low voice, sensitive to the difficulty of what comes next. “I’m gonna set you down on the counter, and I need you to keep watchin’ that fire, alright?” Erin tenses slightly at the thought of losing contact, but she keeps their plan firmly in mind.

 

                “Okay. Go.” It happens so quickly that she barely has time to register that she’s no longer resting on the firm ridge of Holtz’s hips and she has to fight the urge to look up from the contents of her hands. Instead, she relies on her ears to track Holtz’s movement around the room, every bugle of victory and thump on the counter next to her serving to lift her spirits until she’s almost forgotten why she was nervous in the first place. Finally, Erin can hear the snick of Holtzmann’s lighter, and she dares to peep into the gloom.

 

                “ _This is madness_.” Holtz mutters, and for a second Erin worries that she’s referring to _her_ , but then she sees the blonde gesturing to the table where there are literally hundreds of candles littering every available surface, ranging from the small fillers they’ve been using all the way up to hulking Yankee’s that smell like pumpkin spice and pine needles. Erin utters a dumbfounded laugh while Holtz begins lighting them up with abandon.

 

                “Who _needs_ this many candles?” Erin wonders aloud, still bewildered at the vast supply before them, and Holtz turns to give her a toothy grin.

 

                “Evidently, we do.”

 

                “Touché.”

 

                Holtz has the whole kitchen table and part of the counter aflame in no time, and Erin can’t help but grin.

 

                “Ready to implement Phase Two?”

 

                “Aye aye, Captain.”

 

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

 _Holtzmann truly is a genius_. Erin thinks as she grins widely at the contraption before her. And to think, she had never seen the benefits of butcher’s twine. The concept itself was fairly simple, but Holtz more than made up for it in execution points. Using only a tea tray, the aforementioned butcher’s twine, and most regrettably, the world’s tiniest bowtie, Holtzmann had created an incredibly delicate, beautiful chandelier with rows upon rows of candles cascading down like meteors from the heavens. At least, that’s what Erin thought.

                Phase Two goes off without a hitch, starting with Holtzmann briefly ducking out of the room to manhandle her mattress down to the first floor (she may or may not have thrown it down the fireman’s pole) and stealing every sheet, pillow, and blanket in the building. Once she has everything piled on the floor of the library, just one dark doorway down from the kitchen, she trails candles like breadcrumbs until the whole hallway was glowing. When she arrives back at what they’ve taken to calling ‘Base’, she finds Erin holding the Pumpkin Spice candle as close to her face as her eyebrows will allow. When Holtz asks, she tucks her hair behind her ear nervously and shrugs.

 

                “It kinda smells like you…” This comment runs unchecked as Holtz momentarily forgets how to breathe, and then takes a moment to mentally run through the plan one more time.

Using the remaining twine and one of Kevin’s muffin trays, she fashions a carrier for the remaining unlit candles, and backs up to the counter until Erin can hop onto her back again. The real difficulty lies in the fact that Holtz has to somehow carry the _very lit_ chandelier to the library, and it’s almost as tall as she is. Eventual it’s worked out that Erin, She-God of the Long Arms, will hold it to the side while Holtz handles the smaller.

                When they finally shuffle precariously into the library, both physically and emotionally exhausted, Phase Two is successfully completed. Now comes the third and final phase.

 

                “Holtz, I still don’t understand.” Erin gets grumpy when she’s tired, Holtzmann knows this, so she lets the comment slide. Phase Three in its original form was supposed to be a giant fort, gently backlit by candles, but Holtz had quickly come to realize that Erin was not a fan of small enclosed spaces, so she’d had to improvise.

                After shoving the mattress diagonally into the far corner of the room, and hanging the chandelier from a bookshelf for the time being, she begins dismantling the carrier full of unlit candles and stringing sheets along with the twine. Erin continues to grumble until Holtz notices that she’s breathing particularly heavily and stops to kneel in front of her.

 

                “Five.” She orders simply, and Erin fully looks up into her eyes for the first time in what feels like hours and stops Holtz cold. She’s never seen Erin look at anyone like that; it’s like she’s looking at someone she can’t live without.

 

                “Couch. Table. Mattress. Pillows. You.” She doesn’t break eye contact and Holtz feels so very naked and so very cherished that it makes her head spin.

 

                “Four.”

 

Erin feels the couch cushion beneath her hands dutifully reciting, “Velvet.” Reaching forward to the table and wrapping a length of string around her index finger. “Twine.” Stomping her feet a little. “Floor.” Reaching out a hand to caress Holtzmann’s cheek. “You.”

 

“Three.”

 

“Thunder. Rain.” Leaning forward until her head rests on Holtz’s shoulder, lips a millimeter from the soft skin of her neck, listening. “You.”

 

“Two.” It comes out somewhat strangled because Holtz is fairly certain sure she’s being turned inside out. Erin smiles into her shoulder.

 

“Pumpkin Spice.” A long inhale. “You.”

 

“One.” Holtzmann whispers, and Erin’s just so close that she worries she might spontaneously combust. Especially with the track record they have with number one. But this time Erin sits up brightly and grins.

 

“Salty parabolas!” It’s all Holtz can do to stay upright in the face of such sudden and ferocious laughter. (It was true, they’d scavenged more than just candles from the kitchen.) She has to physically stop herself from kissing Erin senseless, extricating herself before whispering,

 

“Just keep thinking about that.” Before she’s up and stringing sheets like her life depends on it and trying to ignore the blush creeping up Erin’s neck. A whole five minutes later, she can sense Erin getting restless again, but she’s just on the brink of pulling the whole brilliant plan together, so she starts humming the most calming song she can think of, which interestingly enough is Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’. As she ties off the last string and rolls back on her heels to examine her handiwork, something completely earth-shattering happens.

 

_Erin starts singing along._

 

There’s a long, terrifying moment where Holtzmann’s heart stops, and she’s not sure if it will ever start up again. Erin’s voice is raw-probably from the crying- but it’s so melodic and rich that she might as well just set herself on fire because the spontaneous combustion is taking too long. Her every nerve ending is like a livewire doused in cold water, and she can only gape as Erin takes in the chorus with a depth and control usually reserved for the stage, and she can’t help but think: _What the hell are you doing here?_

Erin’s voice trails off slowly as it appears that she’s forgotten the words to the second verse but Holtz doesn’t even notice because their eyes are locked and, forget being on fire, she’s just been struck by lightning.

In a desperate bid to escape from the sheer power of whatever that feeling was, Holtz winks suggestively and tethers the last of her twine to the ground, effectively unfurling her creation into all its majestic glory. The sheets rise as one, like a sail billowing in the wind, but what takes Erin’s breath away is the sheer number of candles that have been interwoven into the construction, not to mention the chandelier hanging from the middle. A large part of her would have been worried about the potential fire hazard, but she can see from where she sits that each candle is somehow protected and she is in awe. A very peculiar and detached voice in her head tells her that, but for her love of science, Holtz would make a mind-blowing architect.

 

“C’mon, Princess. Your castle awaits you.” Speechless and exhausted, she can do little more than shuffle drunkenly toward the mattress, flopping onto it haphazardly and watching as the lights flicker along the walls of her flowing fortress.

A yawn of gigantic proportions forces its way through her, and eyelids softly flutter closed. When the mattress dips next to her, it feels only natural to turn and nuzzle her way into the crook of Holtzmann’s neck- rapidly becoming her favorite place to rest- with an arm coming around to pull her in closer. She doesn’t dwell on it, but even through the haze of oblivion, her nerves still manage to flare into life when Holtz whispers, “You know, when I thought about our first time sleeping together, it was not quite like this.”

It’s not enough to get the usual rise out of her, and ironically, the joke backfires heavily when Erin just manages to murmur back,

 

“Me either.”


	2. You taught me what ordinary isn't.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of the blackout, everyone has questions, Holtzmann is hiding, and Erin does physics. So. Much. Physics.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am so so SO sorry that it took so long to update, but I was dragged on an impromptu vacation, so I ended up writing this whole thing by hand.  
> Secondly, thank you so much for the amazing feedback. my ego thanks you.  
> Thirdly, I did SO. MUCH. FUCKING. PHYSICS. for this chapter, and I'm honestly kinda proud of myself because, according to my notes, this is some plausible stuff, but of course I stretched a few things to make it work, so don't fact check me or anything. In addition, I'd like to note that Abby and Patty are wayyy more involved in this chapter, and have I mentioned how much I love Patty? I love Patty so much.  
> Lastly, I'd like to thank tumblr user @anonymouslass-world for her incredible support and help with this. She is a magical unicorn. 
> 
> DISCLAIMER: There is a fair amount of swearing and Erin grows a backbone and I apologize for nothing. Thanks for reading and please let me know how I did. 
> 
> AJ out. 
> 
> Ps. KATE WON AN EMMY HOLY FUCK. That is all.

Erin wakes to the sound of light whispering; she’s always been a light sleeper, a fact that has been very detrimental in her life; However, she’s currently nestled into a bed of warm, blonde curls, so content outweighs curiosity and she allows herself to drift back into the sweet embrace of her dreams.

 

                “Oh my god, they’re waking up. Run!” Abby whispers vehemently to Patty, standing less than a foot away and also appraising the… _interesting_ position Erin and Holtz have taken in slumber.

 

                “No, they’re not. Chill out.” Patty is far less concerned about the spooning going on between her colleagues than she is about the various sputtering candles strewn about the room, dangling much too close to _very_ flammable sheets for her liking. She has no idea how to extinguish them without waking Erin and Holtzy, though, so she settles for a spirited search for the nearest fire extinguisher.

 

                “Seriously, Patty. What in the name of _shit_ is happening?” Abby’s whisper is more of a quiet bellow, and it’s way too early for that, so she takes her by the arm and leads her out onto the main floor. Patty, ever the practical one.

 

                “Baby, I don’t know what the hell went down last night, but I do know that if you scream them awake, nobody gonna be happy. Just leave ‘em alone. You best believe they gonna tell us about it later.” So Abby lets it go, grumbling about candle wax on her desk and desperately trying to hide her smile.

 

 

When Erin wakes for the second time, something is off. She can no longer smell the heady mixture of cinnamon and WD-40 that is uniquely Holtzmann, and she blindly reaches for the other side of the mattress before her hand strikes something soft and warm. Instantly, she is flooded with relief.

 

                “Ya know, I usually buy a girl dinner before I punch her in the tit…” Holtzmann’s voice cuts through the sleepy haze like a knife, and Erin shoots up, snatching her hand away and almost head butting Holtz all in one fell swoop. Erin Gilbert, the picture of grace.

 

                “Hiya.” It takes her a few seconds more to register that the blurry form directly on front of her face is, in fact, Holtz, and she has to blink to refocus drowsy eyes. Holtz is wearing the most shit-eating grin Erin has ever seen, and it’s a little unnerving. Scratch that, totally unnerving.

 

                “Uh, Holtz? You’re scaring me.” Holtzmann just snorts and rolls back over to lounge on what Erin is quickly beginning to realize is her side of the bed (a dangerous thought if you’re Erin Gilbert) and pulls out her phone.

 

                “You know what’s strange?” She drawls, the quirk in her lip letting Erin know that she’ll soon find out what Holtz thinks is strange.

 

                “That we didn’t burn to death in a fiery inferno?” Erin’s usually not this coherent without caffeine, but something about the proximity of Holtzmann’s body to hers has her on high alert. Holtz snorts again.

 

                “Cute. No, what I think is strange is just how _large_ a quantity of propane you can actually buy on the internet. I mean, really, there should be _some_ form of regulation.“ At Erin’s blank look, she continues. “Also, the Mayor is going to be super confused when he figures out that he bought us a two-ton tank of the stuff for no apparent reason.”

                Erin flashes back to the night before, how the whole awful incident could have been avoided if only someone had thought to check the generator, and she feels a little bit like crying. Holtz risked the burning wrath of Jennifer Lynch, just for her.

 

                “Tell them you need it for your proton cannon.” Holtz had bought a Civil War era cannon from a garage sale- don’t ask Erin how she pulled that off- and she had been trying for several weeks to make a proton cannon, similar to Erin’s handgun, but she needed a much bigger acceleration chamber to generate the kind of force necessary to power it.

 

                “I don’t need it for my proton cannon. My proton cannon needs a mini Large Hadron Collider…wait, is that considered an oxymoron?” Erin chuckles lightly, the sound washing over Holtz until her head pulses with her heartbeat and she feels like she’s floating on the sound alone.

 

                “Yeah, but they don’t know that…” Holtz laughs in a whisper and it’s so soft and she’s just glowing that when Erin acts, its’s as if she’s seeing the whole event play out from an outside perspective. Her lips are millimeters away from Holtzmann’s and she feels _reckless_. It seems like such a simple thing; she’s just right there and Erin only shifts infinitesimally until she feels soft skin pressing against her own. It’s like electricity is shooting through her veins, a flames licking up her throat and into her cheeks but when no further movement is made, she starts to panic. Holtz is frozen under her fingertips but as she starts to pull away, apology already bubbling furiously on her tongue, a steady hand grasps at her jaw.

               

Suddenly, she’s _being kissed_. There are long fingers curling through her hair and if she hadn’t already been practically on top of her, she would have felt her body turn to mush under the weight of insistent lips. It’s long and slow and languid and sort of takes on a life of its own. And of course, totally on par with a morning spent in a castle constructed of fabric and fire.

 

                “What time is it?” Erin manages on a gasp, Holtzmann mounting an expert attack against the sensitive skin of her neck.

 

                “Uh…One?” It acts as a question because the last time Holtz checked it was eleven, but that was before at least an hour of watching Erin sleep.

 

                “One?! Shit, Holtz! We gotta clean this up before Patty and Abby-“

 

                “Patty and Abby are sitting very quietly at their desks, doing nothing but sending each other very confused looks.” Holtz interjects, unphased, lip curled in a signature smile. A smile that turns into a  full blown snort at the look of abject horror that crosses Erin’s face before her head falls into the pillow in defeat.

 

                “Oh my god. What are we gonna tell them?”

 

                “We could tell them that we were possessed by the ghost of Cupid and forced to have a romantic, candle-lit sleepover.” The suggestion is accompanied with a suggestive eyebrow wiggle and Erin can’t hold back the giggle even through the vehement shaking of her head. Sobering slightly, Holtz grazes her knuckles along the length of Erin’s jawline and her eyes flutter closed involuntarily. “Or we could tell them the truth…” It’s a gentle reminder that Erin has a whole family that loves and believes in her, not just a particularly dashing nuclear physicist. Erin sighs, at war with her own private nature. “…Or we could tell them nothing at all.” Erin looks up, surprised. She would have expected Holtz to pressure her to do right by their teammates but, maybe in this, there is no wrong or right. And the shy smile Holtz flings in her direction makes her think that maybe she wants to keep this moment for themselves just as much as Erin does.

 

                “Or we could go make coffee?” Erin asks hopefully. “I mean, I could definitely use some caffeine right about now.”

 

                “Erin, I don’t tell you this enough, but you are the smartest woman I know.” Her words are just sincere enough to send a tingle down Erin’s spine, immediately followed by a deep flush that creeps into her neck and makes her ears burn. She shifts, intending to stand, but Holtz has other ideas. She pulls Erin back down for a sweet kiss just on the edge of her mouth, but Erin smiles wide, teeth and lips entering into an equation that leaves her all the best kinds of dizzy.

 

                “Heh, I did that.” Holtz muses into the crook of her neck, awe coloring the soft words, and Erin blushes again. She really should learn to get that under control.

                Nothing more is said as they shuffle to the kitchen hand in hand, leaving a trail of extinguished candles in their wake.

 

******* 

 

                “I don’t care what she said, something is very clearly going on.” Abby’s voice reverberates softly down the hallway, oblivious to the fact that the music is off and Holtzmann can totally hear them.

 

                “I’m sure she’ll tell us what her deal is when she’s good and ready.” Patty rolls her eyes. She loves her team, she really does, but sometimes Abby’s constant need to know everything about everyone is just too much.

 

                “Hey, guys!” Holtz pops her head into the doorway, taking great satisfaction in the way both women visibly jump. Abby swears softly and Patty smacks Holtzmann’s arm.

 

                “Don’t _do_ that to me, Holtzy!”

 

                “Couldn’t resist.” She chuckles, lounging back against the doorframe.

 

                “You crazy.” Patty shakes her head for the umpteenth time that afternoon.

               

                “We are just concerned…” Abby pauses, sharing a look with Patty. “…that you’re going to blow us all up.”

                “Seriously, girl, you haven’t been outta the lab since yesterday, and you specifically told me that ‘Pizza is for dudes.’ When I brought some up last night. You need a vegetable!” Holtz opens her mouth to reply, but Patty cuts her off. “And no, Pringles do not count as a vegetable. Potatoes are a starch!”

 

                “All we wanna know is what you’re working on.” Abby says, taking a different approach. While Holtz is touched that her compatriots are worried about her, this is beginning to feel like a coordinated attack and she isn’t prepared to share.

 

                “Oh. Um…it’s not for the Ghostbusters, per se…” She would have given her favorite pair of pliers for a picture of Abby’s face, but she could also understand where it was coming from. In the entire time that Abby had known her, she had never seen Holtz spend more than a cursory amount of time devoted to anything that wasn’t directly devoted to their cause. “But trust me, it’s important.” Deadly serious, she could see her words resound with Patty, who gave her an understanding smile. Abby, on the other hand, opened her mouth as if to further interrogate her colleague but Patty grasped her shoulder and intervened.

 

                “Okay, Baby, we trust you. Just _please_ try not to blow anything up.”

 

                “You got it, Patts!” As they make their way back down the hall, Abby wrenches away from Patty’s gentle grip.

 

                “What the hell, Patty? I had her right where I wanted her!”

 

                Fixing her with a somewhat sinister smile, Patty replies, “Abby, you know I love you, but sometimes you’re about as observant as a brick wall. Or Kevin. Take your pick. Point is, what we need to do now is have a little talk with our dear friend, Dr. Gilbert.”

 

 ********

 

                Erin is downstairs, chewing viciously on the cap of her marker and trying to solve an equation that would allow them to use ghost ionization levels against the apparitions themselves, but she kept running into the same problem no matter how she came at it. In order to accomplish what she was trying to do, she would have to completely re-polarize each individual ion, which would require so much energy that they would never be able to produce more than a single instant’s worth, not to mention trying to use it each time they went out for a bust.

 

                “If you’re that hungry, Gilbert, we can just order Chinese.” Patty sits at her desk, pretending to analyze some records from a supposedly haunted factory built in 1906, not looking up from the detailed diagrams. Erin hadn’t even heard her come in.

 

                “I’m sorry, I just can’t figure out this equation.” She turns back to the particular variable that’s stonewalling her and sighs in frustration.

 

                “Don’t apologize to me, apologize to the marker. And what are you even trynna do here?” Patty saunters over to stand next to her, regarding the jumbled mess of letters and numbers before her with an air of confusion.

 

                “I’m trying to figure out a way for us to use the negative ions that ghosts produce to sort of paralyze them or defuse them or…I’m not really sure what it would actually do to them but for sure they would lose most or all of the energy tethering them to this plane. It would really cut down on the risks of us getting hurt on the job.” She sighs again before continuing. “But it’s impossible. We’d have to polarize the ions first and we just don’t have the output capacity to do that here, much less out on a bust.”

 

                “Then we don’t do that. We just keep doing what we have been. We’re good at this.” Patty uses her most reasonable voice, so she’s considerably surprised when Erin whirls on her, a hint of panic in her voice and a look of fear on her face.

 

                “And what happens when one of us gets hurt? We just move on, replace them, forget that they ever even existed?”

 

                “Whoa. Nobody’s gonna die on my watch, and it’s never happened before. Why you wiggin’ out like this?”

 

                “I’m not particularly skilled in a fight…” Erin pauses when Patty mutters,

 

                “The way you punched that dude in the face begs to differ.”

 

                “…and we’re not all fearless and reckless. We run enough risk using all this untested technology. If there’s something I can do to make this job safer, then I’m obligated to do it. Screw the physics.” She faces the monster again, marker cap once again clenched between her teeth, and she can feel her anxiety levels rising.

 

                “Okay, for one, I’m pretty sure that last part was, like, sacrilegious for you physics nerds, and two, we just gotta find a way to work through the problem.”

 

                “We?” Erin asks, weak voice full of hope and apprehension.

 

                “Hey, I may not know a whole lot about this mathematical mumbo-jumbo, but you best believe that I am a world champion jigsaw puzzler. So you got the full power of Patty ‘til we solve this thing. But you gon’ have to explain what this shit means first.”

 

 ********

 

They’re still fully embroiled in their conundrum when the doorbell buzzes and Abby’s voice rings through the firehouse.

 

                “I’m in the back, Benny! Go around!”

 

                “ _Man_ , she got a set of pipes on her.” Patty observes, missing the light of understanding that dawns in Erin’s eyes; however, she does _not_ miss the frantic tapping beside her, and she regards Erin with an air of amusement.

 

                “Okay, Baby, what you got going on in that beautiful mind over there?” It’s funny how excited Erin gets when she’s making a breakthrough, almost as if she forgets to hide behind her usual demeanor.

 

                “ _Go around_!” She whispers softly, awe coloring her rasping voice, and clearly Patty has missed something big. “Ugh, how could I be so _stupid_?”

 

                “Uh, yeah, I could use any number of words to describe you: neurotic, antsy, maybe even a little crazy, but stupid ain’t never gonna be one of ‘em.”

 

                “No, Patty, we _go around_ the problem!” She making excited calculations in a clear corner of the whiteboard, and Patty is starting to like this idea.

 

                “Okay, so what does that entail?” She’s careful not to break the groove Erin has worked herself into, instead gently prodding her into explaining the process.

 

                “Okay, so if we try to simply reverse the poles on the negative ions, that would take an insane amount of energy, right? But I’ve been going about this all wrong. Instead, we can flood the area with positively charged ions, and it will act as a neutralizing factor. The ghosts would be exponentially easier to capture.”

 

                “Yeah, okay, that make sense. But how much energy would it take to produce enough positive ions to neutralize a ghost?”

 

                “It would be similar to a proton pack, just with a completely different purpose. This is actually way more practical than my original idea.”

 

                “And we all know Gilbert likes her practical.” Patty chuckles. Her laughter is cut short, however, when Erin drops the pen and throws her arms around the taller woman, pulling her into a tight hug.

 

                “Thank you for helping, Patty. This was really important to me.”

 

                “Yeah, we all know you wanna keep Holtzy safe, and if it works out for all of us, then I’m even more happy to help.” There’s mirth in Patty’s voice, but she backpedals when she feels Erin go stiff against her. “I mean…uh…”  Her stomach sinks when Erin disengages and she mentally kicks herself. True, she wants to talk about whatever had happened two days prior, but she had wanted the conversation to happen organically. While she wasn’t above the idea, she disliked beating information out of her friends. “Look, I just wanna make sure you’re okay. Y’all never talked about whatever happened, and you haven’t stepped foot into the lab in over 48 hours, which is, like, _so_ not normal.”

Erin sighs, wishing with all her might that she could melt into a puddle on the floor.

                “Holtz kicked me out. She told me not to come up there until she’s done with _whatever_ she’s making, and it’s dangerous being around all that radiation anyway and I just…needed to _do_ something.” Erin keeps her gaze on the toes of her shoes, fidgeting with the buttons of her jacket. She hates being looked at, at Patty’s staring at her as if she’s reading her soul like an 18 th century manuscript. It makes her jumpy.

 

                “Aw _hell_ naw.” She exclaims, startling Erin, who’s zoned out counting the stitches on the hem of her skirt. “I wasn’t gonna pry or nothin’ but you have to tell me exactly what went down, because that shit ain’t right.” Erin sighs. She knew she’d have to talk about it eventually, but she was hoping it wouldn’t be right then.

 

                “Uh, well, you know the power went out…”

 

                “Yeah, and y’all burned through Abby’s entire candle collection.” It was true, Abby had been devastated.

 

                “Yeah. I…um. I had a panic attack.”

 

                “Because of the power being out?” Patty’s tone is gentle, understanding. She just wants to know if her friend is okay, and if she can help.

 

                “Not really because of the power, it was more…It was really dark and it brought back a lot of things, and I just…fell apart. Holtz kind of saved my ass.” Patty nods. She’d heard the story, the old lady next door, and she could see how an experience like that could mess a person up.

 

                “Aight, that makes sense. I was wondering why you never turn the lights off.” Erin winces and Patty places a comforting hand on her shoulder.

 

                “I was hoping that nobody picked up on that.”

 

                “Baby, it’s okay to have shit that scares you. Makes you human. I mean, when we started out, I was scared as hell. The trick is not to let it get in the way of doin’ what you gotta do. And for the record, I think you doin’ a damn fine job of that.” Erin finally meets her eyes, tears clinging to her lashes,

 

                “You really think that?”

 

                “Do I _ever_ lie to you people?” At Erin’s subtle head shake, she smiles bright. “Uh-huh. That’s what I thought. As for the whole Holtzy-kicking-you-outta-the-lab thing, who knows? Bitch is crazy. She probably just doesn’t want to scare you off with her shitty disco.” But Erin just mutters and stares and a corner of the board, willing herself not to cry. She shouldn’t be this torn up about the whole incident, as if it were some momentous occasion in her life just because somebody had seen her, raw and stripped away, and hadn’t run away. There had been something in the way Holtzmann had melted against her, in the way she had exuded wonder at being allowed that far into Erin’s personal space that left her craving 80’s ballads and Pringles and storms, all things she had tended to avoid before meeting Holtz. But she had been wrong earlier: Holtzmann had seen her-truly seen her- and now she was pushing her away.

 

                “Don’t sweat. I’m sure she got her reasons. Just be happy being the smartest bitch out there, Gilbert.” Patty gives her one more shoulder pat before heading in the direction of the garage. There was a candid conversation that needed to take place between she and Abigail.

 

******** 

 

                Holtz raked a hand over her face in frustration. She was no good at programming. Simple code was a breeze, but something of this magnitude was more in Abby’s area of expertise. It wasn’t insanely complex coding, but she needed to condense a literal universe’s worth of information into a computer the size of a Kleenex box. The small kind. She was drawing a total blank.

 

                “Holtzmann, I got your Mu Shu!” Her concentration break when Abby shoves a plastic bag under directly under her nose, and she’s forced to pause and recalibrate.

 

                “With extra plum sauce and the little pancakes?” She asks brightly, one side of her mouth lazily raising into a lopsided grin.

 

                “What do you take me for?” Abby teases, unloading the loot before taking a seat on the stool usually reserved for everybody’s favorite particle physicist. “And to think, I only had to save the world to get my damn wontons.” Holtz hums along goodheartedly, knowing fully well that the whole wonton crisis had been the product of a drunken Abby telling Benny just exactly where he could shove his wontons. Of course, she hadn’t remembered a thing the next morning and Holtz had never seen fit to remind her. “So you gonna tell me exactly what we’re working on here, or am I gonna have to drag it out if you with Pringles and whiskey?” Holtz groans, whishing with all her heart that she’d never revealed that particular piece of information. Given enough Jack Daniels, she couldn’t keep a secret with a gun to her head. So instead, she appeals to Abby’s not inconsiderable ego.

 

                “You can actually help. I need _this_ file…” Pointing to the screen of her Mac. “…to fit on _this_.” The small cube she’s built- at perfect angles, let it be known- would fit in the palm of her hand, made of burnished steel that she’d actually _purchased_ , and contained possibly the world’s smallest super computer.

 

                “ _What_ is that?” It’s such a departure from Holtzmann’s usual style of design- all polished edges and sleek lines- that Abby almost refuses to believe it’s Holtz’s work.

 

                “A secret.” She replies with a conspiratorial grin.

 

                “Okay, well, what’s the issue?” Abby’s instantly in problem-solving mode, and Holtz sighs in relief.

 

                “The file’s too big. I forgot that galaxies are more complex than proton polarizers.” Abby shoots her a look, and she shrugs. This is not her kind of science.

                “What’s the goal, though?” Does it need to stream or are you putting it on a loop?” Abby smiles internally, an inkling of understanding poking through the haze of mystery.

 

                “I need to stream, but without a connection because I don’t really know where this baby’s gonna be?” Holtz runs a hand through her unruly curls, wispy tendrils of hair coming to frame her cheeks. Abby smiles.

 

                “So we need to jailbreak this bitch!” She cackles gleefully, and Holtz isn’t used to being unsettled by her colleagues, but the evil smile on Abby’s face has her pulse jumping. “I learned this in grad school.” She says, hands a blur as she finesses the keys to do her bidding. “You got the stream from NASA, right? So what you do is hack their satellite feed, or at least pretend to, and when their security responds, we piggyback that and it’ll grant us full administrative capabilities. But then we hide by mimicking their code. Virtually undetectable…Hand me that?” She motions to the adapter extending from the cube and Holtz jumps into action. “So what we do from there is leak the current feed 24/7 to little Cubie there, and we won’t have to worry about connectivity because we’re directly linked to the satellite.” Holtz grins and rests her chin on Abby’s shoulder.

 

                “Abbs, you’re a magical unicorn.”

 

                “Forget everything I just said; it’s so far beyond illegal. And now my fucking soup is cold.” Abby growls, hopping of the stool and heading for the door. She pauses as she steps out of the lab, throwing a look over her shoulder. “And Holtz? Whoever she is, she’s gonna love it.” Taking pleasure in the way the usually unflappable engineer flushes from head to toe, she struts down the hall immensely pleased with herself.

                Holtz, for her part, hates feeling transparent and she frowns as she gingerly unplugs her new creation, handling it as if it were made of uranium. And for how much it means to her, it might as well be. But she can’t think about that now. She’s got work to do, and every second that Erin spends banned from the lab causes her some form of imagined pain. It’s been two days since she woke with limbs intertwined and soft breaths curling under her jaw, and she thinks about it far more often than she feels is strictly necessary. Holtzmann has never been good at relationships, platonic or otherwise, and she’s really more of a ‘fuck and run’ kind of girl anyway, but she can’t shake the feeling that she has to do something to prove herself, to prove _to_ herself that she’s about as invested as one can get, and all those mornings of sneaking out of windows and climbing down fire escapes don’t mean that there’s anything inherently wrong with her. Sure, those nights of skin and tequila were fun, but when the sun inevitably rose, she found that her confidence always worked against her. Girls wanted Jillian Holtzmann, physical embodiment of charm and sexuality, not Jillian Holtzmann, disconnected and more dedicated to the theoretical than to second dates. They invariably loved the idea of her, never the actual woman hiding behind the goggles and Screw-U pins. So she’d grin and shimmy into last night’s overalls and out of any real chance of getting hurt.

                With Erin, it was different than all that. She’d been suave and cavalier to start, but Erin had never shied away when the crazy crawled through the cracks. Erin would chew on markers and smear ink on her nose and she knew eight good uses of a cadaver- _today_. Erin would always smile just right when she made a breakthrough and ran laps around the lab, whooping hysterically; Erin knew both parts to every 80’s duet and would often abandon her own work just to sing melodramatically into an empty can of Pringles; Erin had seen her, under all the bravado and innuendo, and nothing had ever changed. She still blushed at every joke, still fed Holtz pizza when her hands were covered in grease and ectoplasm, and she never ran away. She never made Holtz feel any different for all her quirks and Holtz just didn’t know how to _tell her_. How do you tell someone that their smile forces the breath from your lungs or that you keep a running tally in your head of every time you’ve ever touched or that the feeling of their lips on yours makes you want to believe in a God because there is no way someone as perfect as she is came together by chance? How do you ask her if any of those things apply in the reverse? Holtzmann’s biggest problem has always been her inability to get her thoughts out as fast as they occur, but now they’re coming out faster than she can fathom and they’re all coming out _wrong?_

                How do you tell the most perfectly flawed human in the world that you are completely and irrevocably in love with her?

 

******** 

 

                “ABBAAAYYYY!” Patty isn’t into playing that hide-and-seek bullshit, so she stands at the bottom of the stairs and shouts, knowing that her voice will echo throughout the building and possibly into the alley behind as well.

 

                “What the _hell_ , Patty!?” Abby pops her head out of the garage, glasses askew and one headphone dangling precariously over her shoulder. “I’m working! Kevin still can’t work the phones, so I’m building us an app! What’s so fucking important!?”

 

                “Roof. Now.” There’s no room in her tone to broker resistance, so Abby straightens her glasses, irritated, and dutifully climbs the stairs beside her insistent companion. The moment the heavy door latches behind them, Patty is a blur of words and motion.

 

                “First of all, Imma kick Holtzy’s ass if she ever pulls something like this shit again, but _baby_ , do I got news for you!” Abby’s only ever seen her this animated when she’d busting, so she subconsciously takes a step back.

 

                “Okay?” It’s uncertain, questions marathoning at light speed across the front of her mind. Patty loves Holtzmann to death, so she’s automatically on the defensive. Secondly, she makes it her damn mission in life to know everything that goes on in the firehouse, so the chances of something going on that she’s unaware of are so slim she wouldn’t bet against Kevin graduating full honors from Harvard Law.

 

                “They in love, Bitch!” Patty’s eyes light up like Time Square, her whole face erupting into such a breathtaking smile that Abby finds herself grinning along.

 

                “Who is?” Unaware, she bobs along as Patty dances to a beat only she can hear.

 

                “Holtzy and Gilbert!” She sing-songs, melody popping out of nowhere and Abby freezes.

 

                “What!? Erin? And Holtzmann?” The utter confusion that infuses her voice sends Patty into hysterics.

                “Yes! Don’t you see it?” She claps and cackles like a kid on Christmas. Abby frowns as she processes, the crease in her forehead pushing her glasses down on her nose until she resembles a mildly disgruntled librarian.

 

                “What I see is Holtz having one night stands and making gifts for strangers and Erin taking on impossible tasks because they can’t bear to be in the same room anymore. I mean, did you see the looks on their faces when we went on that bust yesterday? Holtz almost got impaled because Erin was glaring at that waitress and they haven’t even spoken in _days_! Erin avoids the lab like the plague and Holtz won’t come down to eat. And they just glare at each other all the time.” She crosses her arms, confident in her ability to refute a preposterous idea.

                Patty just stares and waits for it all to connect, embarrassingly satisfied when Abby’s jaw falls open and she makes a choking sound.

 

                “Holy shit. Holy fucking motherfucking shit.” Abby doesn’t usually swear, but Patty’s not the best influence in that regard and this is a monumental realization.

 

                “Ha! I told you! They in _looooove_!” Patty’s still dancing in place, more overjoyed at noticing something Abby hasn’t than the realization itself, so she doesn’t see the evil grin spread across her colleague’s face.

               

                “We’ve gotta help them!” The gears are visibly turning in Abby’s head and she may or may not have developed an eye twitch.

 

                “Whoa there, Charles Manson. I did not agree to any matchmaking shenanigans. Let them figure it out for they own damn selves!” Patty stands tall as she admonishes Abby, no longer in her groove and very aware that Abby has a tendency to bowl people over if she has a goal in sight. That being said, something really does need to be done for the two nerds downstairs because Erin has cleaned every inch of the firehouse _twice_ , and Patty does _not_ do well with hovering.

 

                “But we have to do something! I had to force feed Holtz her Mu Shu earlier, and I think I caught Erin doodling instead of revising her article in spectral ionization. I’ve never seen her doodle. _Never_!”

 

                “Baby, if we do tell either of them- or both- before they realize it themselves, it’s gonna create a whole lot more problems than it’s gonna fix. And I don’t want any part in it.” Patty is honestly getting real tired of constantly being the voice of reason. I mean, you’d think that between a well-meaning albeit megalomaniacal theoreticist, a finicky yet charming particle physicist, and a brilliant but out-there nuclear engineer, they’d have an ounce of common sense between them, but as they say, you can’t have it all. Patty has common sense though. She has common sense coming out her ass, and it’s telling her that you can’t force these kinds of things, especially when the whole team dynamic is at stake. If the wrong thing is said at the wrong time, her entire new family could be blown apart, and she is _not_ about that life.

 

                “Okay, but what of it’s something subtle? Like sending them out on busts together? Or leaving them alone together in an enclosed space for several hours?” Abby’s green eyes have a gleeful sort of light behind them and Patty can’t help but think that, as much of a pain in the ass her friend can be, she wouldn’t trade her for all the gold jewelry in the world.

 

                “Honey, you ‘bout as subtle as a firework. Just let it work itself out naturally. Remember, plausible deniability is on our side at the moment. The second we lose that, we screwed.” Abby nods thoughtfully. They can’t let on that they know anything or the whole dynamic will be altered, and if there’s anything she doesn’t like, it’s anything- or anyone- messing with her team.

 

******** 

 

                Erin was antsy. Anyone standing within a ten-foot radius could feel it rolling off her in every direction. Patty left after twenty solid minutes of pen clicking, unable to concentrate on the biography of Hedy Lamar she was trying to finish, and Abby had stomped off hours later, furious that Erin had arranged her files in alphabetical order and straightened every sheet of notes into ninety-degree angles. “Yes! It’s chaos!” She had conceded. “But it’s _organized_ chaos!” Erin had cleaned every non-radioactive surface she could reach and she’s polished Patty’s bookshelves _twice_.

                Now she’s sitting on the living room couch, an epic white Ethan Allen monstrosity that the Real Estate agent said they just had to have, reading a book on Genetic Physics. Only, she couldn’t remember anything from the last chapter and she wasn’t even interested in genetics anyway; Mendelian Approach was _boring_ \- a word she couldn’t remember ever having used before. It was madness, waiting for something she wasn’t even sure was actually going to happen. The whole situation had her stomach turning in knots, and not the fun kind. Not the kind she felt when Holtz would wink in her general direction, or when she would place a gentle hand on Erin’s back when ushering her through doors, or the exact angle of her jaw when caught by the sunlight.

                She needed to do something, a project to fill all the places in her mind that are usually filled with all the extraneous thoughts about Holtzmann. There was an added level of anxiety because she had only just heard the full length version of the incident with Abby’s possession and she just continues to feel more and more helpless. There has to be something more she can do to keep them all (Holtzmann) safe than just theorize all day to keep herself from going crazy and leave the actualization to everyone else. Sure, it all starts with her, but she’s decided to do something she’s never done before and end it too. Applied physics is about as far from her area of expertise as genetics, but if her 2385 SAT score is anything to go by, she couldn’t fail _all_ that miserably, could she? She’s going to take her dielectron theory and turn it into reality. But first she needed Patty, because if there was anyone who could provide a decent distraction, it was she. Granted, Erin would be risking the ultimate wrath of Holtzmann, but she still hadn’t made that proton shotgun she was always talking about, which meant that it probably wouldn’t actually happen, and Erin thought that would be an excellent place to start.

 

 

                Patty shuffles into the lab uneasily, all about helping Erin and all, but she hates tricking her friends, especially Holtzy, who she’s come to view as her sort of crazy adult scientist child, so a lot it being asked of her here.

 

                “Hey, Holtzy.” She begins tentatively. “Baby, you haven’t eaten since yesterday, and if you don’t get out of this lab, you gonna go crazy…well, crazier.” Despite her unease in this particular situation, she manages a tone that brokers no argument, but Holtzmann barely looks up.

                “I’m not done, Patts. We can go have dinner at the Ritz when I finish- I’ll even get all gussied up for ya- but until then, I’m not leaving. Not until it’s perfect.” She speaks so seriously and vehemently that, for a second, Patty almost doubts that it’s actually Holtzmann she’s speaking with.

 

                “Look, I don’t know what you got going on up here, but I do know that every hour Erin has to spend in the office, the quicker we’re gonna run out of cleaning supplies and Abby’s getting crabbier by the second, so you’re coming with me, whether you like it or not.” Holtz at least has the decency to look chagrined, and Patty notices the pained look that follows with a special excitement. The level of pining going on here is almost enough to make her nauseous. What she can’t for the life of her understand is why Li’l Crazy here has decided to lock herself away in her proverbial tower. Some people just don’t see happiness, even when it slaps them in the face, she decides.

 

                “Can we get spaghetti?” Holtz asks finally, fully aware of her negligent behavior.

               

“Baby girl, Imma get you the best spaghetti in New York. I know this guy over on 20th and I swear to god his sauce will make you cry.” Holtzmann puts her dremel down for this first time in six hours and flexes her cramped fingers, a textbook grin shoving its way onto her thin face.

 

                “Okay. To be honest, I was kinda getting sick of the taste of Pringles and Red Bull.” She throws on a hoodie that Patty is almost certain once belonged to Erin, and she shakes her head. Holtz insists on using the fireman’s pole whenever possible, so when Erin creeps into the lab, soft footsteps go unnoticed.

                A wave of nostalgia washes over her as she inhales deeply, radioactive isotopes and the smart scent of hot soldering wire assault her in the best way possible. She shakes her head to regain her train of thought. As hurt as she is that she’s been unceremoniously thrown out of her usual workspace, she’s got shit to do. She spots the pipe across the room almost as soon as she begins to look, and it’s a quick process to find the other materials she thinks she’ll need; she knows the lab so well by now that it’s almost second nature for her to juggle gold-plated titanium allow along with the components she needs to build an electromagnetic radiation chamber. Everything else she need she can get from the lab at Columbia. She still has a few decent friends there, although they’re mostly lab techs and they’re only friends because she’s the only professor who didn’t totally ignore them, but that’s beside the point. She has what she needs and it’s time to get to work. As she hustles out of the lab, the seemingly insignificant cube of steel that has consumed Holtzmann’s every waking minute for the better part of a week goes completely unnoticed.

                What she really needs now is a workspace, somewhere that won’t disintegrate under the force of an infrared electromagnetic pulse or leak radiation into the water supply. She needs a loft above a run-down Chinese restaurant where no one will be looking for a lone Ghostbuster. So, naturally, her first call is for take-out.

 

********

 

                “Benny, look, I only need to use it for a few days, and no, you can’t have Abby’s number, for the last time. She’s only into you for your wontons. I’m sorry. No, that’s not a euphemism.” She’s standing at the top of the stairs, gazing into the past at a place where a simple fire accompanied by a rousing performance of DeVo had kick started the last few exhilarating months of her life and she smiles a true, full-teeth smile rarely witnessed by anyone, living or dead. She’s going to do something insane in here, and it has her heart racing and her ears buzzing. For the first time in her life, she’s going to be reckless for no other reason than that she can. It has nothing to do with another fearless scientist that’s refusing to let her in so she’s occupying her mind with the constant high of adrenaline mixed with radiation exposure. That’s preposterous.

                She unloads her duffle onto one of the well-worn tables, one corner scorched by the very instance that has her uncoiling gold wiring and shaking canisters of liquid nitrogen. She starts with the task that she’s the least confident about: building and electromagnetic radiation chamber and the infrared dielectron laser confusion component. She has the gold-plated titanium alloy for shielding to reduce boil off (something Holtz had taught her), a spectrometer to evaluate levels of magnetic radiation needed to reverse polarity of the negative ions as well as to regulate frequency of the infrared beam. She had spent so much time in the lab _not_ watching Holtz defy the laws of the physical world- and she’s not so sure they qualify as ‘laws’ anymore- by building genius technology out of literal garbage that building the actual weapon was as simple as following her own blueprints (She’s actually handmade blueprints.), but the real problems came one by one until she was ready to give up.

                First, she had to control the heat caused by the friction of fusing an EMP with an infrared laser, which she handled easily enough by creating a circulation of liquid nitrogen that flows around and between each separate casing, but then the ugly monster reared his massive head. Her dielectric oscillation chamber wasn’t equipped to handle the higher frequencies of an infrared beam, and to top it all off, in a liquid, molecule rotation occurs at one radian per picosecond (in this case: ectoplasm) which, in layman’s terms, means that her frequency needed to oscillate at upwards of one hundred trillion Hertz every one trillionth of a second. Which was nearly impossible unless she were to use a near-infrared frequency, in which case the electromagnetic field, when applied at such a frequency would distort molecular dipole movement and the consequences of actually using the technology in tandem would be unprecedented. But so was the ghost apocalypse, so what the heck? Erin smiles. Being reckless is fun.

                When she recalculates for the nth time, she finally realizes what she’s been missing. Sure, her new shotgun would vaporize a ghost, or at least render it immobile, but that’s what they had proton packs for. The issue at hand is that molecular vibration frequency occurs at roughly the inverse of the time it takes for the molecules to bend, but distortion polarization completely disappears at a frequency higher than infrared. So it’s left to her to find the perfect frequency (i.e. 10^11 Hz every picosecond) and be able to recreate the reaction without being completely certain of how the molecules themselves would interact with each other. Over and over. No pressure.

 

********

 

                True to her word, Patty laughs as Holtz nearly bawls at the taste of Lou’s homemade spaghetti sauce, and she’s riding cloud nine like a Harley, considering she’s been able to get Holtz out of her funk, when Abby calls. Abby never calls; not unless there’s an emergency, a bust, or Kevin has grabbed the wrong phone again. Answering quickly, Patty notes the distressed look on Holtzmann’s face. Whatever the situation is, they both know it’s not good.

 

                “Yo, Abbs, what’s up?” Patty tries to ask calmly- mostly for Holtzy’s sake- but fails spectacularly.

 

                “Have either of you seen Erin lately?” Concern is palpable in her voice, a full octave higher than usual, even over speaker phone. Concern laced with anger, like she’s witnessed the physicist in question step out on her before and she’s just been waiting for it to happen all over again.

 

                “Uh…she was there when we left?” Patty trails, angry at herself fir agreeing to deceive her friends, and at the same time not wanting to tip them off. Her stomach churns at the guilty look on Holtzmann’s face, like a kicked puppy, and her delightful chicken parmesan almost makes a comeback.

 

                “She hasn’t answered any of my calls or texts, and it’s been over four hours. Also, the bust bag is gone.” Referring to the giant duffle bag used to carry extraneous equipment on busts. Abby sounds scared for the first time since Patty has known her, and she really _really_ hates lying to her family.

 

                “Listen to me, she’s been stressed lately. Girl probably just needed to blow off some steam. Give it another few hours before you can officially freak, okay?” Patty sounds convincing, she knows she does, but it hurts in a way she’s never felt before to see the lights dim in Holtzmann’s eyes and her shoulders slump forward dejectedly.

 

                “It’s all my fault.”

 

********

 

                “Where the fuck is she?! I mean, did you see the look on Holtzmann’s face? She’s been playing Regina Spektor for hours. This is just like her, to run away when things get real. She’s afraid of being happy, because she thinks that bad things always happen once you’re finally happy. I should have known this would happen. And she just left Holtz with nothing. I swear to _God_ , when I track her down-“ Abby’s rant is cut short when Patty interjects.

               

                “You’re not gonna do a damn thing. She’s been gone for 12 hours. That’s nothing. Holtzy once went dumpster diving for an entire night before we even started to get worried. You’re projecting all your stupid baggage onto the situation and it ain’t helping shit.” Abby looks affronted at her baggage being called stupid, but she has to admit that Patty may have a point. Erin jumped into a fucking portal to hell to save her. If anyone had proved their loyalty, it was Erin. But that still didn’t explain where she’d gone or why she hadn’t told anyone. Whatever was going on, she needed to figure out her shit, and fast.

 

                “You know, right before she left, she had a really big breakthrough on this equation…Maybe it has something to do with that?” She does her best to sound convincing, but she’s never been that great of a liar and she can see that Abby remains skeptical.

 

                “Whatever you know, spill.” There is no refusing the directive when Abby’s looking at her like this, but Patty still hesitates. She hates lying, but she hates breaking promises more. “You know, I still haven’t paid you back for that extra slap…” Abby threatens, deadly serious and turning a disturbing shade of red, and Patty realizes that she has no choice if she doesn’t want a tiny handprint permanently embedded in her face. And a face like hers is too perfect to risk that kind of trauma.

 

                “Okay, look, all I know is that after Holtzy banned her from the lab and she had her big breakthrough, she mentioned something about the proton shotgun and made me get Holtzmann out of the lab so she could jack some ‘supplies’. That’s it. I ain’t got nothin’ else.” Patty flinches instinctively when she’s finished. Sure, she’s a big lady, and that’s usually enough to deter people from messing with her, but Abby’s got a lot of rage in that tiny body and the way she’s clenching her fists is enough to make Patty nervous.

 

                “And you didn’t think this was worth mentioning, oh I don’t know, before I tried to file a miss- oh god.” The abrupt look of horror that slams onto Abby’s face is almost comical. “You don’t think…you don’t think she’s trying to _build_ something, do you?” That happened to be exactly what Patty thought, but she’ll be damned if she’s gonna say it out loud. “Once, in college, she tried to build a bookshelf from Ikea. I found her on the floor, screws everywhere and the instructions shredded and smoldering in the trashcan. She’s gonna kill herself!” The story so perfectly describes Erin that Patty can’t hold in a little laugh, though it’s cut _very_ short at the murderous look on Abby’s face. “I blame _you_.”

 

********

 

                Jillian Holtzmann knows nothing about art. She has an eidetic memory, so she has no trouble recalling Starry Night perfectly, but there’s something very different about appreciating it in her head and translating the image onto anodized steel. Not to mention that Erin was missing, she couldn’t find her favorite pipe to bash things with, and she could barely see through the film of tears that blurred her vision. This was all her fault, she’d always been awful at grand gestures; she recognizes that kicking Erin out had been a monumental mistake, but she didn’t know how to fix it. She’d never missed someone so viscerally: Erin’s quiet humming as she cracked thousand-year-old conundrums, the soft feeling of her thigh touching Holtzmann’s own when they invariably sat next to each other at dinner, and the dancing- oh god, how she missed the dancing. Erin gets this particular kind of smile, the kind reserved just for duets and Disney classics. She misses the way her voice always cracks a little when ‘Never Had A Friend Like Me’ comes on, and she misses the way Erin laughs. Like she doesn’t want to break composure so it’s always a second late and she unfailingly tears up with the force of it. Holtz misses the blushing and the furtive glances when Erin thinks she isn’t looking. Holtz misses everything about her, but most of all, she misses the way Erin’s lips felt on hers, body melting into her and filing all the cracks. She misses being in love and feeling like nothing could ever go wrong ever again. But it’s all wrong now, and the only person she has to blame is herself. So she conjures Erin’s favorite painting into her mind until all she sees is wind and starbursts, and she picks up her dremel, and she translates sorrow into whirls and spires, the way it was meant to be remembered. After all, the nightlight itself was working perfectly now; she just had to make it as beautiful as the girl who had needed it most and never got one.

 

********

 

                Erin smiles grimly as she steps into the alley yet again. Sure, welding wasn’t nearly as easy as Holtz made it look, and she had a new appreciation for the odd wardrobe; she favorite blouse is still smoldering in a dumpster somewhere, but she’s so damn proud of herself because something that once would have been a devastating loss doesn’t even register. Holtzmann’s gadgets are effective, the whole team can attest to that, but this… _creation_ is sleek and shiny and maybe even a little bit beautiful. And Erin is 99% certain that it works now. Granted, the first few tests hadn’t exactly yielded the results she’d hoped for (the first test had actually given the ectoplasm sentience), but she had known starting out that there would be complications-there always are- but she has a _feeling_ about this one. She’s still not totally sure how the molecules will react with each other, but after the last few tweaks, she’s confident it will combine them into something more harmless than ghost-goo.

                She hangs the balloon full of said goo about fifty feet down the alleyway (Not exactly the most elegant approach, she knows, but it’s all she’d got to work with.) and pulls out the shotgun. She’s decided to call him DeBye, a reference both to the physicist whose theories she has just disproven and to the first time she’d ever seen Holtz dance. DeBarge my ass.

                She takes aim and prays to the Unknown God, an amusing notion she’s carried with her since she was forced to take Philosophy as an elective. The scope is perfectly calibrated- New Reckless Erin still has scientific morals, after all- and she fires, cringing as she does. As much as she’s getting the hang of this whole fighting thing, in the absence of an excessive amount of adrenaline rushing through her system and the threat of imminent death, the echoing crackle feels deafening in the otherwise quiet alley. True to form, the laser hits the large ‘X’ she’s drawn on the balloon dead center and it explodes. She flinches on reflex; she’s been slimed one too many times not to fear the inevitable, but not a single drop reaches her. Stepping forward cautiously, sentient ectoplasm very much on her mind, she examines her handiwork.

                Where there once had been a squirming mass of viscous apparative projection, only a puddle of clear water remains, dripping lightly from a swaying shred of latex. _Water_.

 

                “Son of a _bitch_! _Fuck_ yeah!” She can’t help but cackle into the silence, oblivious of the concerned older Asian woman peeking around the corner. _It works_! It actually works and it’s only taken 26 hours and innumerable dubious looking crab rangoons to accomplish the most amazing feat in her checkered career. Who gave a damn what the late Martin Heiss would have said? Not Erin! She was an asset to modern physics and no one could prove her otherwise. The Ghostbusters had found a way to eradicate the very thing that gave ghosts their seemingly endless supply of energy, effectively sucking them back into their own plane, and the byproduct was just the cherry on top. She _could not wai_ t to show Abby and Patty and… _Holtzmann_.

                Her stomach sinks at the thought. She wouldn’t have anything without them- hell, she’d still be helping twenty year-olds understand quantum theory in a stuffy classroom- but it was Holtz who had given her everything else. Her confidence, tenacity, the ability to solder -albeit indirectly- and a sense of purpose, but she couldn’t stop the words from echoing in her mind.

 

_Look, I’m working on something big here, and if you keep distracting me, I won’t be able to get anything done, so can you just…give me some space?”_

 

It had felt like ice running through her veins and a punch to the gut all at once, and she’d only spent hours tearing up after blindly agreeing. And now she doesn’t know what to do. Waltz right back into the firehouse, claiming she’s solved all their problems, knowing fully well that she’d never dance in the lab, never laugh and blush, never wake up tangled in soft blonde curls and mischievous grins? Knowing that lighting a candle to stave off the mounting panic would never feel the same?

Maybe the Old Erin would have just walked away. Maybe she would have stepped back into tweed skirts and try to convince patronizing Deans that she wasn’t crazy. But Reckless Erin isn’t about to abandon her family, not again. Unreciprocated love or not, she’s going back to the one place in the world where she belongs. Her heart may be in her throat and her stomach somewhere around her toes, but she packs up her bag, dons her jumpsuit, and strides away from what is undoubtedly the worst Chinese restaurant in New York.

 

*********

 

                It’s Patty who first notices the door crack open, soft footsteps still managing to echo among the vaulted ceilings, and she crushes Erin into a massive hug, whispering into her ear, “Abby is going to kill you and Holtzy has been playing Celine Dion for the last thirteen hours _straight_.” She pauses, pulling the smaller woman in even closer. “But I’m glad you’re back; it hasn’t been the same without you…and I hope you did what you needed to do.” Which is approximately the moment that Hurricane Abby sweeps into the room, shoving tables aside and knocking stacks of books scattering to the floor. Patty releases Erin and rolls her eyes dramatically.

 

                “ _Twenty-seven hours_!” She bellows. “You were gone for _Twenty. Seven. Hours_. And you didn’t even have the decency to leave a note! _You’re lucky we didn’t file a missing person’s report_!” Patty snorts. Abby side eyes-her before continuing. “Which we could have done! _Three hours ago_!” There’s so much wind in such small lungs that Erin just chuckles brightly, even if she’s risking life and limb in doing so. _They care_. What can she say, really? Reckless Erin just really loves her team. “Oh, you think this is a fucking _joke_?! I almost had to slap Patty!” She’s beginning to sound slightly hysterical as she sends Patty an apologetic look. “And Holtzmann has been inconsolable. I’ve heard ‘All By Myself’ more times in the last day than Celine has performed it in her _entire life_! What in the _actual fuck_ is wrong with you?!” It’s a splendid rant, really, and Erin thinks Abby must’ve been up half the night working on it, but all she can do is embrace her tiny tornado and smile. Abby, of course, is utterly stymied by this reaction and, for once, seems to be at a loss for words.

 

                “I love you too, Abby, but there was something I had to do.” Abby opens her mouth, as if to deliver another scathing comment, but Erin cuts her off. “And it was really only twenty-six hours, if we’re being technical. I had to walk all the way from China Town.” Both teammates give her questioning looks, and she finally has a chance to unearth her baby. “It seems that most taxi drivers don’t want anything to do with _this_ …” She drops the bust bag and unveils DeBye with a flourish. Patty mutters something about being right all along just as Abby starts with “What the-“ But they’re all cut off by a surprised and raw voice behind them.

 

                “You found my pipe!” Holtzmann is standing on the bottom step of the stairs, mouth agape and red-rimmed eyes alight with something more than just wonder.

 

“Um…yeah. Holtz, about your pipe…” Erin mumbles as Holtz whoops, a sound that stops abruptly when she hops off the stair.

 

“What did you do to it!?” There’s no anger in her voice, just a childlike excitement that elicits an unexpected grin from Erin.

 

“I, um…modified it? His name is DeBye and he’s my breakthrough.” Patty crosses her arms and stares pointedly at Abby, who has the decency to look chagrined.

 

“DeBye, as in the famed ionic physicist?” Holtz asks gleefully. Erin flushes from head to toe and stares at a beam on the ceiling.

 

                “Yes. And also for DeVo, the song you danced to when we first started…” She trails off and Abby makes a retching sound. “You never got around to making that proton shotgun, so I, um… kinda needed it?” It’s the truth but she says it like a question because she’s always been the most vulnerable when admitting to needing anything.

 

                “But what does it do?” Holtz eyes are abnormally wide behind her goggles and Erin smiles small, offering the weapon up to her excited colleague.

 

*********

 

                “You made this?” Abby still sounds skeptical but Erin ignores her, instead looking to her other two colleagues.

 

                “Never thought I’d say this, but Gilbert got _face_.” Patty’s dancing again, a little shimmy that most often reveals her happiest moments, but it’s Holtzmann’s face that is the most rewarding. She stands in awe, gingerly holding DeBye by the stock and stroking the barrel.

 

                “You used _liquid nitrogen_ as a circulatory coolant?! That’s something _I_ would have done!” Erin giggles.

 

                “Yeah, I was actually…” She forces a cough. "I was channeling my inner Holtzmann. It’s just, you make literally all of our stuff, and you’ve taught me a lot, plus I’ve never exactly paid you back for the Swiss Army Knife…” She’s staring at her shoes again, so she doesn’t realize it when Patty physically drags Abby into the kitchen.

 

                “But why didn’t you tell me?” It’s so soft and sad that Erin can almost hear her heart breaking all over again.

 

                “You told me not to come into the lab, so…” Her own admission is just as soft and maybe even a little sadder. But she’s never felt more broken when she sees the soft shudder that indicates Holtzmann crying and Erin is surprised to find tears streaming over her own cheekbones.

 

                “You know I’m not good at this kind of stuff.” Holtz voice cracks and so does Reckless Erin’s resolve. “But I just…You needed it…and I needed to make it. And if you were there I never would have been able to concentrate, and everything is wrong and it’s my fault.” Erin is just about to protest that nothing in the world could possibly be Holtzmann’s fault when Abby’s clear voice rings out.

 

                “Gear up! We got a bust!” Patty swings down the down the pole, dressed in her jumpsuit already, as is Abby, who saunters out of the kitchen, toast in hand. Erin’s been wearing hers for the last thirteen hours, so she’s beginning to feel like she lives in it. It seems, for once, that it’s Holtzmann who’s been caught unawares.

                After several minutes of flurrying action, the Ecto1 is screaming into motion, Holtz cackling gleefully and Erin fumbling for her seatbelt; Reckless Erin doesn’t necessarily have a death wish. In the meantime, Patty’s giving them the lowdown on the situation.

 

                “We’ve got a class five in an abandoned warehouse on the docks, multiple apparitions. Back in 1962, a factory apparently burned to the ground. They never could say exactly how many casualties because of the intense, everything was incinerated. _Why_ do they keep insisting on building on top of this shit?” The siren blocks most of Erin’s thoughts, as loud as it is. A fact that she’s sincerely thankful for. Going into a bust with a head full of decidedly non-busty thoughts is dangerous for all of them. She’d never be able to live with herself if one of them got hurt because she couldn’t separate work from her personal drama. Still, she can’t keep herself from brooding over what Holtz had said. Apparently she needed something? What that might be, she had no clue.

 

                “Okay guys, heads in the game!” Abby shouts as they screech to a stop, the burning rubber leaving long trails on the asphalt. They quickly unload the vehicle and Abby pulls Erin aside. “You better hope that thing works.” The comment stings a little, but she understands where it’s coming from. She remembers all too well the Ikea incident, but she’s come a long way since then, and she feels a small surge of confidence at the thought. There would always be people who doubted her, who refused to believe in what she was capable of, who told her she was a joke and a freak but she realizes that’s _life_. She’s Erin Gilbert, Doctor of Particle Physics, Ghostbuster, and reckless defier of the laws lesser minds had deemed to govern the universe. She’s indomitable and now, she’s aware of it. Eat your heart out, Heiss.

 

                “Gilbert, let’s _go_!” Patty’s already opening the rusted door of the warehouse, and Erin realizes that her moment of self-discovery has caused her to fall behind. She jogs to keep up, a devilish grin finding a home on her lips.

 

                _Let’s do this._

_********_

So…multiple apparitions turn out to be more like twenty, and more are filing in through various hallways that lead directly onto the main floor of what appears to be an abandoned meat-packing plant.

 

                “Upton Sinclair would have had an aneurysm if he’d seen this place!” Holtzmann shouts over the screeching wails of the dead. Abby chuckles and Patty lets out a full on cackle -she loves it when her teammates make history jokes, it makes her feel more included- but Erin barely takes notice. She’s in the _zone_.

                Patty and Abby are in one corner facing outward, slamming ghost after ghost into the open containment unit between them. Erin and Holtzmann are in much direr straits, however. Back in the beginning, they’d all agreed it was best to work in teams of two, thus minimizing the potential for injury and/or possession, but they’ve been separated. Erin stands directly in the center of the massive hall, while a particularly malevolent wraith has Holtz cornered, spewing ectoplasm in thirty foot projections with the pressure of a fire hose. Erin’s been relying on her Holtz-made proton pistol, reluctant to whip out her shotgun until she knows it’s completely necessary, but the sight of Holtzmann shoved into the corner, blindly tossing grenades in various directions while simultaneously trying to wipe the goo off of her goggles feels an awful lot like necessity. Holstering her pistol and slinging DeBye around from its resting place across her shoulders, she takes aim. Only to be knocked aside by a floating forklift. Anger and fear fuse into her bloodstream and she lets off a shot almost reflexively. The kickback knocks her out of range and she watches triumphantly as both the specter and his ghostly ride explode in a shower of mist. Where there once was a glowing apparition, now only a dribbling puddle of water remains. Erin struggles to her feet, the added weight reminding her to renew her gym membership when this is all said and done. A distressed shriek from Holtz’s direction sends her thoughts screaming into order, a single minded determination igniting her blood, eyes locking onto a pair of goggles still splattered with ectoplasm. Rage blurs the edges of her vision, tunnel tinged with red, and suddenly she’s in explosive motion. One after another, ghosts evaporate before her in a flurry of spectral rain. She takes no notice of the way her hair is plastered to her forehead with a mixture of sweat and artificial condensation, ignoring the lacerations and fingers tearing at her jumpsuit. She rolls and slides and fires and feels so very _alive_. She’s a whirl of lasers and electromagnetic pulses, and yes, she is Erin Gilbert: reckless, badass, and _definitely_ the picture of grace. Using both her pistol and the shotgun, she manages to trap and a cyclops-like creature while simultaneously vaporizing an oncoming, ax-wielding crisp of a foreman whose shredded overalls read, “Giuseppe.”

 

                “Bye, Giuseppe!” Erin shouts brightly as water sprinkles down around her, twirling her pistol and just _itching_ for something else to destroy. Something that somewhat resembles a simple ball of fire makes a break for Abby and Erin locks onto target, adjusted to the kickback by now, and feels positively giddy at the look of shock on Abby’s face as she’s drenched in a torrent of water, Mr. Flame effectively extinguished.

 

                Holtz watches in bewildered wonderment as Erin, buttoned-up, tightly wound, never-been-good-in-a-fight _Erin_ storms around the room like a blazing typhoon _-_ like this dance of fire and roll has been choreographed, distracted until she hears a “Holtz, on your left!” From directly behind her. Erin has materialized out of nowhere and _this_ is how they fight. Back to back, as a team, nothing standing in their way. She hears a distant crackle as the ghost currently brandishing a cleaver in the direction of her head rains down in a shower of mist, soaking her to the core but otherwise rendered d-e-a-d _dead_ , and she surveys the situation. Abbs and Patty are chasing a cackling apparition down the hallway to their right, and it’s just her and Erin, surrounded in a sea of flashing lights and evil eyes, and she just grins. One decides to rush her, apparently appraising her as the weaker target, a large mistake if her dual pistols have anything to say about it. She turns in time with Erin’s footsteps, eviscerating any ghost within reach in a calculated spiral, and she’s never felt so goddamned powerful in her life. They’re a hurricane of death, a maelstrom of mist and destruction until the last remaining entities- seemingly enraged at the deaths of their comrades- decide to attack all at once. She dispatches of the first easily enough, the hollow laser trapping him in one of the containment chambers that litter the floor, but she’s distracted by a pained grunt from just to her right, and her heart jumps when she sees the deep gash across Erin’s left cheek -apparently, the ghosts have learned to throw- and she viciously dispatches of the perpetrator, time passing in slow motion as Erin’s eyes widen and she realizes her monumental mistake. In turning around, she’s left herself completely exposed to the very last of the undead, and there’s no time to correct. She has just enough sense to drop like a stone as Erin fires directly over her head, the explosive laser close enough to singe the top curl of her elaborate doo, and she’s hypersensitive to the splash of freezing water that envelops her, and then it’s over. She straightens, realizing after the fact that the motion brings her in close proximity to Erin’s face, flushed with exertion and excitement, and she just can’t possibly help it.

 

                “Erin Gilbert, have I ever told you how much I love you?” She freezes immediately, hoping fervently that Erin will miss the serious note in her voice, but Erin just nudges her shoulder and fires back.

 

                “Now is _so_ not the time, Holtz.” The flood of relief that streams through her body is almost enough to wash away the disappointment. Almost.

                Erin sets about collecting the various containment units littering the floor, now drenched in a horrifying mixture of ghost-goo and dead ghost-goo. She doesn’t even bother avoiding the viscous slime, and there’s something very different about the way she carries herself, as if she’s finally realized just how vital she is to this operation. Which is partly the reason she misses Holtzmann’s soft admission.

 

                “Not now, but someday.”

 

********

 

                Erin stands alone on the roof, hours later, starlight enough to keep the darkness from becoming unsettling. She feels good, really good, despite receiving an impassioned lecture from Abby about destroying potential specimens and the uses of a cell phone. It was long and strongly worded and extensively thorough, but she could detect a note of pride in Abby’s voice which only served to lift her spirits further. Today, she’d felt useful, vital even, and she’s beginning to understand that Reckless Erin is simply Erin as she has been all along, only unfettered by her own fears and reservations about how she would be perceived. She’s so embroiled in her own thoughts that she doesn’t register the squeak of the door opening behind her.

 

                “It’s bright tonight.” Holtzmann’s voice is soft beside her and she hums in agreement. Broken heart or not, she’s content in the moment and feels no need to disturb that. Holtz, however, clearly has other plans. “Look, I, um…I have something I need to show you, and it’s probably stupid or whatever but -uh- just come downstairs?” There’s vulnerability in her thick voice, and Erin feels an inexplicable compulsion to do anything Holtz wanted, letting Holtzmann take her hand and lead her down into the lab. It feels like ages since she’s set foot in the room she’d come to think of as home, and nothing has changed. Her pack is still hanging above Holtzmann’s, and the smell -radioactive isotopes and electric discharge- is enough to create a knot in the back of her throat.

 

                “You know that I suck at the whole grand gesture thing, despite my charismatic appearance and charm, and I realize that kicking you out of the lab was…stupid, but if you’ll give me a chance to explain. I hope you’ll forgive me.” Erin rolls her eyes at the ‘charm’ line, but otherwise motions for Holtzmann to continue.  “Okay. Uh, it’s a well-known fact that opposites attract, I mean when you put and infrared laser inside an electromagnetic radiation chamber, you can create literal lightning in a shotgun.” She pauses, as if considering her previous statement. “Well, _you_ can. But that’s beside the point. I don’t…connect with people. I understand circuit boards and nuclear reactors better than I understand my own emotions. But then you come along, with your tweed and tiny bow-ties and your gigantic mind and I…don’t know how to work anymore! My brain short circuits and I can’t even build a simple radio without you sitting next to me, and I’m scared of that. Fear is not a normal reaction for me, but Erin, I’m _terrified_ of you.” She pauses again to take a shuddering breath, and Erin can see her visibly shaking. “I can’t sleep without your hands in my hair, and I think about the exact shade of yours more often than I think about black market plutonium, which is a total first for me, and it’s not fair. Not fair that nobody believed you, not fair that you still don’t get to prove them wrong, and it’s not fair that someone like you has to sleep with the lights on, so I, um…I made this. Because I believe you, I believe _in_ you, and that’s what you do for the people you love.” She halts abruptly, unceremoniously shoving a small metal box into Erin’s arms, and she blushes more than she did when Dr. Gorin ate dinner with her in the lab every day of her sophomore year. She’s exposed and she want’s nothing more than to love Erin until Erin has no option but to love her back. Until the end of time, which she’s pretty sure she can prove is an illusion anyway. Her heart beats irregularly as Erin examines the object in her hands.

 

                ‘I forgave you a million years ago, Holtz, but you’re going to have to tell me what this is.” Holtz rubs her neck in frustration. She should have started out with that explanation.

 

                “Well…your parents never let you have a nightlight, so I sorta…made you one? See, look. It works like this.” She’s so anxiously animated that she misses the utter look of shock and adoration plastered on Erin’s face. Her eyes are wide and the quickness of her breath has nothing to do with panic. A fact that changes very quickly when Holtz shuts the door and ushers her over to the light switch, making sure to place the box on the floor next to her feet. Taking Erin’s hand, she gently guides it up to the switch, flicking it off before diving down to press a discrete button on the cube’s side.”

                Every ounce of apprehension in Erin’s entire being is replaced by awe. Nebulae and galaxies explode around them, swirling like dust motes on a sun beam, and Erin can’t name the feeling pressing upward into her chest with a burning warmth. It’s love, she thinks, but it’s never felt like this before. She steps forward through the Horsehead Nebula, arms slightly outstretched and fingers extended as if she can feel the color and stardust seeping into her veins. Her serotonin levels are rising at an alarming rate and she lets out a choked laugh as tears fall unhindered to the floor. She dances through galaxies she could never name and she’s flying through the best dreams of her childhood, the one’s you snooze your alarm for just to finish. She’s never cried so happy. She’s leaking joy like a broken dam; if perfection were a feeling, she’d be imploding with it just like the supernova she’s standing in.

               

                “Holtz…how?” She doesn’t even recognize her own voice, words coming out like a gravel road, but she needs to know. Spiral galaxies swirl as Holtz pushes off the wall and edges toward where she’s standing in the middle of the universe.

 

                “My lesson in life was that everyone needs something. You needed a nightlight. I needed to make something that explains what happens when I see you smile.” Erin can’t help herself when she grasps the straps of Holtzmann’s overalls, gently pulling her closer. The air is charged as the universe is reflected in Holtz’s eyes, and falling into her is like falling into a black hole: inescapable and unknown beyond the depths of what can be seen. And she’s never been so sure of anything in her life. Reckless.

                Erin’s forehead rests softly against Holtz’s, breaths intermingling as she draws closer, floating in place. Her hands slide up to cup a silken jawline, and when her lips finally brush against Holtzmann’s, they’re literally flying through space. It’s as soft as the rings of Saturn, gently brushing against her cheek, and when Holtz slides callused fingers into her hair and pulls her that much closer, nothing else will ever matter. They’re celestial beings witnessing the ethereal births of stars, engrossed in nothing more that the feeling of hands on hips and skin and ribcages extending with soft exhales, broken whispers of longing stretching into infinity, and for the very first time in her life, Erin Gilbert is in love with the dark.

                Holtz disengages long enough to run satin lips under a velvet jaw to place a kiss behind her ear so delicate that it has Erin soaring.

 

                “Erin Gilbert, have I ever told you how much I love you?” Right then, that eternal moment amongst the stars, that’s someday.

 

********

 

“Okay, I haven’t seen Erin in an hour and a half. Any more ‘breakthroughs’ you’d happen to know about?” Abby snaps, pizza boxes piled on the table, and she’s getting irritated. Patty shakes her head and offers,

 

                “I think she went up to the roof a while ago. Maybe we should go make sure she didn’t fall off, day she’s had.” Abby’s grinning, remembering being soaked in something that doesn’t take _days_ to wash off.

               

                “Right behind you.” They climb halfway up the stairs before Patty amends her statement.

 

                “Maybe we should get Holtzy, too. Girl loves pizza.” They continue their ascent to the second floor before they see the lights. The lab door is closed, which never happens, and they share a look of concern.

 

                “If Crazy in there let a ghost out in the lab, Imma smack her silly.” Patty remarks before they hightail it down the hall.

 

********

 

                In retrospect, they should have been more careful, but caution is the last thing on their minds at the moment. When the door shoots open, Erin has Holtzmann pressed up against a table, lips on the surprisingly soft skin of her collarbone, and Holtzmann’s hands are weaving through her hair -and not gently, either. Crop-tops have been shed and there are definitely two buttons missing from Erin’s blouse. Abby stands in shock, a hand coming up quickly to cover Patty’s eyes.

 

                “Bitch, get yo hand outta my face!” Patty snaps, shoving Abby’s arm down, and she whistles. “Gilbert got _game_!”  But their colleagues are too focused on each other to even notice they’re being watched. Abby sprints away when Holtz lets out a deep moan, and Patty follows quickly behind when she hears the distinct sound of a bra unclasping beneath the shreds of Erin’s shirt. “I ain’t _never_ gonna unsee that.” She mutters vehemently, cracking a smile when she hears Abby holler “MIND-BLEACH!!!” from the floor below.

 

“I was right. Admit it.” Patty says smugly, ten minutes later as Abby chews in silence. As nauseated as she claims to be, nothing -in this world or the next- can separate her from a slice of supreme.

 

                “ _God_. And to think, I helped her hack into _NASA_ just so she could get it on in the lab with _Erin_.” 

 

                “You did what?!” Patty chuckles. It’s been a good day, all told. They’d busted like never before and her best friends were in love. Things could be worse. Of course, when the offenders come down half an hour later, Holtzy’s hair a mess and Erin’s shirt duct taped together, the other two burst out laughing so hard that Abby ends up snorting her pizza and Patty has to wipe tears from her eyes.

 

                “Um…guys, we have-“ Erin is cut short by Abby’s sharp voice.

 

                “Erin, if you know what is good for you, you’ll shut the fuck up. Right now.” Which sends Patty back into hysterics and Holtzmann wiggles her eyebrows suggestively.

 

                “It would seem, my beautiful sunfish, that we’ve already been outed.” Erin doesn’t even blush.

 

********

 

                The next time it happens, they’re _positive_ they’re alone. Patty had dragged Abby to some club and Kevin had left hours ago, mumbling some excuse about a friend’s drag show. And it’s not Holtzmann’s fault that Erin is especially hot when she’s in the midst of solving an equation and she can’t help but think that the lips currently occupied with the cap of her marker could be put to _much_ better use. So when Kevin bursts through the door, muttering something about eyeliner, Holtz is seated on Patty’s desk, Erin between her knees, groaning at the feeling of lips tugging an earlobe and hands caressing the soft skin of her hips, they’re suitably surprised.

 

                “Oh, hey guys!” He waves happily, and Erin reaches a shade of red she’s never before been capable of.

 

                “Hey, Kev.” Holtz remains unfased, until Abby drags Patty through the door a millisecond later.

 

                “He was wearing _lipstick_!” She’s ranting. Surprise, surprise.

 

                “Yeah, but did you see that ass?” Holtz and Erin are frozen, haven’t moved an inch; Holtz gets a little chill of excitement that Erin’s lips are still attacked to her neck, but the feeling is

short-lived when Erin jumps away, crashing into a bookshelf as she goes.

 

                “W-we were -uh- looking for Holtzmann’s earing!” She stammers, an octave too high for the statement to be even possibly believable.

 

                “Holtzmann doesn’t even have her ears pierced.” Abby says, accusingly.

 

                “ _Really_ , _MY_ desk? For fuck’s sake!” Patty is much more concerned about the virginity of her desk than the compromising position her colleagues are in.

 

                “Whoops?” Holtz manages to say with a straight face.

 

                “If her ears aren’t pierced, then why are we looking for her earing? Is it a clip on?” Kevin is already on his hands and knees, searching the floor. Erin is intensely amused.

 

                “If you all don’t mind…” Erin says over the general noise of muted conversation. “I’ve got a room upstairs with a huge bed and a galaxy nightlight, so we’re going to go have amazing space sex.” She states it abruptly and authoritatively, and for once, Holtz is the one to turn beet red. Abby chokes on an intake of air, and Patty’s eyebrows fly past her hairline. Erin takes Holtzmann’s hand and practically drags her stumbling up the stairs, Holtz turning to give the others a double-fingered salute before disappearing down the hall.

 

                “Did she just-?” Abby can’t bring herself to repeat the words, and Patty backs away slowly, dragging Abby along with her.

 

                “Yup. It’s official. Erin’s been possessed. I’m leaving. _Forever_.”

 

                “I second that notion.” Abby stutters frightfully before following her counterpart back through the door, once again crying out for mind-bleach. Kevin stands alone, thinking about lost earrings and wondering what space sex means and what it has to do with being possessed.

 

 

                Reckless Erin, Holtzmann quickly learns, is fucking _awesome_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ps, chapter 3 is like this chapter but on steroids, and I plan on ripping your hearts out and sewing them back together like the Dr. Frankenstein I am.


	3. And I Want To Keep Us All Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An incident sparks a relapse for Holtzmann as everyone else tries to figure out how to help.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I typed this all in one sitting and did a buttload of research (again) so for the love of god drop a comment loves. 
> 
> This is the last chapter and I am very tired. Enjoy.

                It starts off subtly, a missed meal here or there, it’s making Erin nervous. At first, she writes it off on her natural instinct to worry and she doesn’t want to open that particular can of worms when she doesn’t know what’s going to come slithering out. Reckless Erin reminds herself that she’s forgone her fair share of meals when she’s in the middle of cracking an equation. But the problem she’s currently facing is that Holtzmann doesn’t ever seem to feel the need to make up for what she’s missed. She studies and examines and _exerts_ herself just as much as the rest of them, but her intake seems to be dwindling into the ‘one meal every 18 hours’ category. Even then, she’ll only eat until the obligation is fulfilled before disappearing back into the lab or worse, she’ll just sit there until everyone else has finished. Holtz does an excellent job of making a meal look eaten when Erin has watched her take all of three bites. Granted, Erin finds herself watching Holtzmann far more often than she feels is strictly necessary, even for a non-determined person of romantic interest. It’s been two weeks since their first official ‘date’, although Erin thinks that maybe Chinese take-out and Love Actually doesn’t exactly count (but it’s the first time no one’s walked in on them, so she’ll take what she can get). She’s reluctant to disturb the groove they’ve gotten into by trying to put a label on things. Sure, she’s never gone rogue and built an EMP shotgun purely from missing someone before, and she’s certainly never had anyone fit the entire universe into a box for her before but for some reason, she’s still hesitant. She’s just got this feeling that something isn’t quite right, and she flat out refuses to be the one to exacerbate the issue. And sure, the word ‘girlfriend’, when applied in context with Holtzmann, sets her pulse racing; but so does everything else about her: her mind, her loyalty, her sensitive nature hidden behind a million layers of nonchalance…Erin’s a goner.

                But Holtzmann still flirts with the bartender to get them free drinks, and sometimes the way she looks at Ms. Lynch makes Erin want to do more than just punch someone, and she can’t shake the creeping feeling that it’s all part of Holtzmann’s complex way of deflecting whatever malfunction seems to be occurring. Of course, whenever they’re alone, Erin is suddenly being kissed like all the oxygen in the world is in her lungs and Holtz is slowly asphyxiating, but recently there’s been a lot of silence. They still dance around the lab like maniacs and Holtz does her level best to make Erin blush at the most inopportune moments, but something’s changed. A light has gone out in Holtzmann’s eyes and it’s slowly cracking Erin wide open. She finds herself shaking as she watches Holtz work, disregarding safety even more than usual, and she feels so freaking clueless.

                It’s a Friday night coming off of a _huge_ bust, so Patty gets them into a schmancy club (she’s big in the party scene) and Abby has to physically drag Holtzmann out the door. As they slide into a generously sized booth in the VIP section (once again, thanks to Patty and their general status as Ghostbusters) Abby announces that she has to use the restroom, making very pointed eye contact with Erin before leading the way through the crowded building and muttering something about regulations and fire marshals. Once she’s checked (violently, one might add) to make sure that they’re alone, she turns gravely to Erin.

               

                “You’ve noticed it too, right?” Nothing else of note has gone wrong recently, so Erin is forced to conclude that Abby has followed her same observations.

 

                “Um, Holtz? The eating thing? Yeah, I’ve noticed.” She sounds more sarcastic than she meant to, but there’s nothing more she knows about it so she’s patiently waiting for Abby’s take.

 

                “Something happened the other day. I found her crying in the lab, and not little tears. I thought we were gonna have to start building an ark to escape that flood.”

 

“Why didn’t she say anything to me?” Erin is officially in freak-out mode at this point, hands fluttering and breathing rapid. Abby shoots her a look as if it’s obvious.

 

                “Oh, I dunno, maybe because she knew you’d do _this_?” Abby’s biting sarcasm, while usually appreciated, does nothing to calm the panicked physicist standing before her. “Erin. Relax. The point is, we’re here to have fun, and if you pump her full of enough whiskey, she’ll tell you anything.”

 

                “ _Abby_!” Erin looks scandalized by the very notion of trying to pump Holtzmann for information by way of intoxication, as sinfully appealing an idea as it may be at present juncture. “I’m not going to _drug_ Holtz just so she’ll tell us what’s wrong!” She’s as appropriately indignant as someone who might actually be considering the idea can possibly be.

 

                “Well, if she won’t tell _you_ …” Abby trails, huffing as she does.

 

                “What?” Erin senses frustration in her best friend and she’s confused by it.

 

                “If she won’t tell _you_ , then it’s gotta be bad. Like, nuclear physics is no longer considered a science kind of bad. I need you to talk to her, at least.” Erin realizes that she’s confused concern for frustration -an easy thing to do where Abby’s concerned- and then Old Erin pops back up like a whack-a-parasite.

 

                “What if she won’t talk to me?” If they’re being totally honest, Holtz is a bit of a loose cannon. Erin’s favorite moments are when Holtz builds magical pillow forts and they lay watching the heavens spin on the sheets around them and talk about nothing and everything. Something Erin had been surprised by was Holtz’s sense of humor. They could lie for hours and Erin would never stop laughing. Underneath the zany personality and constant euphemisms, Holtzmann is genuinely hilarious, and she can make Erin laugh until her ribs hurt and the muscles in her face ache, tears rolling down her face into the pillows under her head. So the thought that they had spent so many nights telling each other their darkest fears and deepest secrets, yet there’s still something Holtz isn’t willing to share stings more than Erin is willing to admit. “Okay…I’ll ask.” She murmurs hesitantly, to Abby’s visible relief.

 *****

 

                Patty drags her onto the dance floor at some point, but Holtz just isn’t feeling it, and it’s visible as she shuffles along, none of her signature moves making an appearance. After several tense minutes, she makes a half-hearted excuse about needing fresh air, and she steps into the back alley. She’s hoping for something a little darker and a bit dingy, but clean and brightly lit will have to suffice. After a few moments of brooding, she takes a rumpled pack of American Spirits from her jacket pocket, the leather worn and comfortable, familiar. She fingers her necklace and her stomach churns, eyes filmed with unshed tears.

                She hates this, hates trying to act normal around her friends, around Erin, but a part of her past has reared its ugly head and she no longer knows how to cope. So she’s reverting to old habits, the smell of smoke in her nostrils and the buzz of nicotine in her veins serving to calm the persistent tremors in her hands and the jitter in her knee that just won’t seem to stop.

 

                “I wasn’t aware you smoked.” A soft voice materializes through the night, a slim figure coming to rest against the brick wall to her right. Erin doesn’t accuse, just states, appreciative of every little fact she can glean about Holtzmann. She motions vaguely for the cigarette, soft paper rustling as it settles comfortably between familiar fingers. She takes a long drag as Holtz finally faces her.

 

                “I don’t.”

 

                “Me either.” Erin expertly passes the cigarette back to its rightful owner, an echo of a conversation once held amidst a night of candles and panic ringing through her mind, but all she feels now is affection. “You can tell me, you know. Nothing you could possibly say would change the way I see you.” There’s a sincerity in the words that Holtz has only ever heard from one other person and it breaks her.

 

                “It’s Rebecca.” There’s an awful lot of sorrow contained in just two words, but Erin doesn’t make the connection. Silence fills the air before Holtzmann realizes she hasn’t given nearly enough information for her current state of melancholy to make sense. “I mean, Dr. Gorin. Pancreatic cancer. Inoperable.” She pauses before the one word she hasn’t been able to reconcile with comes tumbling out, “Terminal.” The words seem automatic and her tone is detached, which worries Erin the most.  Dr. Gorin had been her mentor, her only family for so long that it feels very wrong to think about a world in which she didn’t exist.

 

                “Holtz, that’s-” She intends to say awful, but Holtzmann cuts her off before she has the chance.

 

                “She won’t see me, won’t let me visit. She says she’s been ‘compromised’ and that it’s not worth experiencing. She doesn’t want me to remember her like this.” Somehow, Erin understands this. Her grandmother had had Alzheimer’s and she would give anything not to have watched the slow descent into gibberish, but instead be able to remember her as the vibrant, flaming firecracker she had been all her life, but that won’t help Holtz. Which is currently the more pressing issue.

 

                “Holtz, there’s nothing you can do. Sometimes these things happen and it’s got nothing to do with right or wrong or good or bad. It just is. She would never want you to jeopardize your own heath for her benefit. She loves you, so you do what you know, because it’s what she taught you. That’s how you remember her, that’s how her legacy lives.”

 

                “A world without Rebecca Gorin is not a world I want to live in.” Holtz states bitterly, flicking the cigarette away and marching back inside, leaving a dumbstruck Erin standing in an alleyway with no idea where to go next.

 

 *****

 

                Days go by, there are no pillow forts or midnight coffee runs. There are very few jokes and even fewer meals, and Erin cries herself to sleep alone under the Milky Way, desperate to help, but no idea how to do so. It’s the black holes that kill her, though, because she can see Holtz hurtling towards one, and if physics has anything to do with it, there will be nothing left once she crosses the event horizon. So she wills herself to sleep, tears sneaking out from behind closed eyelids; so she can dream about a world where Holtzmann still kisses her to sleep and she wakes up with a hand clutching the fabric of her shirt. But then she wakes to a cold, empty bed and she swears a small piece of her dies.

                She spends a lot of time thinking that whether or not one can slowly die of starvation of affection, because she would be wasting away to nothing if one could. It’s precisely that thought that sparks an idea that burns as bright as a supernova. Rebecca had said she didn’t want to see Holtz, but nothing had ever been mentioned about a Dr. Erin Gilbert.

 

*****

 

                “Rebecca, apparently you have a visitor.” The nurse is annoyingly chirpy, and Erin chuckles as she hears the response from the hall.

 

                “If she’s blonde and wears yellow goggles, tell her to go build a nuclear reactor or something!” The nurse seems extremely concerned about this, but ushers Erin into the room anyway.

 

                “She’s very loud.” He whispers in Erin’s ear before exiting quickly, making sure to close the door in the process.

 

                “Oh. Dr. Gilbert, nice to see you again.” She has a way of speaking that makes every word sound utterly businesslike, friendly or otherwise. She’s seated upright, IV protruding from one hand and reading glasses perched precariously on her nose. Erin can’t help but notice the worn copy of “Ghosts From Our Past” on the nightstand, but her apprehension refuses to dissipate. Rebecca looks well for someone who might as well be a walking time bomb, and her long hair is pinned up as always. She notices Erin’s questioning look and smiles grimly.

 

                “Chemo is for dudes.” Erin can’t help but chuckle before the nervous smile worms its way back onto her face.

 

                “Look, I need to talk to you. About Holtzmann.”

 

                Dr. Gorin is surprisingly easy to talk to, though even Abby would be astounded by her intense level of dry sarcasm. She looks very much the same with the exception of her eyes, which have sunken in deep, and the way her every move is calculated, as if the only part of her body that doesn’t hurt to move is her mouth. She speaks very matter-of-factly, as if daring Erin to challenge her. The whole interaction feels a little like a game for which Erin doesn’t know the rules.

 

                “I spent more time with that girl than I did teaching, which is impressive. She has the mind of a genius on steroids, but when I first met her, she couldn’t formulate a sentence coherently without using the word ‘sorry’ incessantly, as if she were apologetic for simply taking up space.” While she’s busy trying to accommodate for this new information about Holtzmann, she can’t help but notice the ‘Screw-U’ pin firmly attached to Rebecca’s hospital gown. It seems the familial bond is mutual.

 

                “She’s not eating.” The words tumble unexpectedly from her lips, quickly and they seem to fall like anvils in the space between them. Gorin closes her eyes, head falling back to rest on the pile pillows currently serving to prop her up. A shaky sigh works its way through her thin frame. Erin, though, has no way to prepare for the torrent of expletives that come hurtling in her direction.

 

                “Goddamnit, that girl is going to bloody fucking kill herself, and I refuse to be the shitting reason why. With her history, I’m really not that surprised, but honestly, I thought we were past this.” Rebecca looks genuinely furious and Erin finds herself legitimately frightened by a hundred-pound cancer patient with fire in her eyes.

 

                “What do you mean ‘her history’?” She’s quiet, attempting to placate the rage visibly radiating from the woman before her.

 

                “You have to push her through it, Gilbert. I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care if it hurts your relationship. She needs someone to push her. And as for her history, that’s not my story to tell…but you have to find a way to make sure that just because a member of her family -metaphorically speaking- is dying, she doesn’t confuse her sorrow for self-loathing. I’m relying on you to fix this, because unfortunately, they won’t let me transport my gown wearing ass downtown. We’re talking about the closest thing I have to a daughter here.” There’s a conviction in her voice that sounds a lot like tears and Erin resolves to do whatever it takes.

 

                “But…how did you know about us?” Rebecca smiles, a genuine, joyful grin that softens a beautiful hard face made of sharp lines and crow’s feet.

 

                “Oh my dear Doctor Gilbert…you wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

 

*****

 

                Holtz throws her favorite pliers as hard as she can across the lab, denting a can of helium as they hurtle through the room. She can’t concentrate and the hard knot in her stomach does nothing to help the situation, but the mere thought of food makes nauseous and she thinks she might throw up again. Except she knows that pure bile and stomach acid burn like fuck and there’s nothing left to purge anyway. She doesn’t know how to describe this feeling, and her hands are shaking so badly that everything she touches turns into a mangled mess. It’s as if someone’s set off a nuclear reactor where her heart used to be and there’s lightning behind her eyes. Every pump of blood that surges through her veins takes more of her sanity and she’s become far too used to staring at Erin’s whiteboard, letters and numerals seared into the foremost facet of her mind. She can’t stand them right now, any of them; because they’re all so vibrant, so alive when every breath she takes is slowly spreading poison through her nervous system. She’s dying from the inside out -or the outside in, she really doesn’t know which- and soon there will be nothing left of her. As she crosses the room to inspect the damage done by her sudden outburst, it strikes her that maybe Rebecca won’t see her because she resents having to carry her all the way through that first semester, and then almost as much through the second. Maybe Gorin only helped because of her potential, but the person inside was never worth saving. A black smile worms its way onto her lips and she’s falling. Back into the abyss her mother had created decades ago, all the comments about how a man will never want her if her thighs jiggle and her stomach bulges. Her mother is dead, as is a father too involved in his work to ever notice the skin and bones frame that his daughter hung herself on. And so is her grandfather, smelling of cinnamon and patiently showing her the exact angle to set her pliers at in order to strip in long strokes without damaging the treasure inside. The man who’d spent weeks in the garage supervising the construction of a robot who could replicate an image programmed into it. An automaton, he’d called it, and he’d even let her do all the soldering and filing, but at the science fair and eleven-year-old had been given a B and a grandfather had been scolded for ‘helping too much’. Holtz had wanted to yell, scream at the stupid teacher that she’d barely even let him touch the thing, but instead she’d gone home and trashed it. He had come into the room to see various parts of the instrument strewn about, a mangled hunk of metal no longer resembling their carefully crafted machine, and a child crying bitterly on the floor amidst the chaos. But he had only taken her small face into his large, capable hands and asked,

 

                                _“What’s next?”_

 

                That’s the problem. There is nothing next for Holtz. She needs someone to take her face in their hands and drag her gently out of this black hole. Hands like Rebecca’s had done. Hands like Erin’s could do.

 

                But for now, her grandfather’s pliers are broken, and so is she.

 

*****

 

                Patty drags Abby to a coffee shop because she’s so tired of whispering in corners and she knows Abbs can’t whisper for shit anyway, so they sit in the late October sun drinking tea and espresso (black like me, baby) and not saying anything. Finally, Abby breaks the silence.

 

                “Erin went to go see Gorin. The hospital said she was in good spirits, but Erin clammed up as soon as I asked her where she went. Like there’s some big conspiracy that I don’t have high enough clearance for.” She’s not pissed, as Patty would have expected, only a little confused and something that might sound like sad.

 

                “Holtzy’s going crazy up there, I can tell. Everybody tiptoeing around it, and she’s stuck in her own head. But there ain’t nothing we can do if we don’t know the whole story. I hate feeling helpless like this. We gotta do somethin’.” She makes agitated motions with her coffee cup and Abby finds herself fixated on the way the dark liquid sloshes close to the edges of the mug but somehow never actually spills a drop.

 

                “Uh…yeah -right. We have to get her out of things for a while…maybe we could send them on a cruise!?” Abby is far more animated and far less graceful, cardigan splattered with droplets of chai, but she’s so enamored of her brilliant plan that she doesn’t even seem to notice.

 

                “Abby. What would happen if we sent Erin, the most seasick person I have _ever_ met, and Holtzy, who’d probably try to rewire the engine into hyperdrive, on a cruise? Bad things. Bad things would happen.” It’s true, Erin get seasick on the ferry to _Manhattan_ , and Holtzmann would probably try to convince the captain to let her steer or something.

 

                “Well, what’s your bright idea then?” She’s always a little petulant when her ideas get shot down, but Patty has a point.

 

                “Girl, why do I always gotta be the one who comes up with the solution when it comes to those two weirdos?” Her voice starts off confident but loses force as she realizes that she really has no clue how to help, a feeling she is not well acquainted with or equipped to handle. She downs her espresso like a pro and stands abruptly. “Whatever it is, we gotta figure it out fast. Nobody should have to live like that.” Abby scrambles to keep up as they stride off down the block.

 

 

*****

 

                “Holtz, I need you to eat something.” Erin’s voice peeps from the hallway.

 

                “I’m busy.” Her tone is harsh, but it’s the only way she knows how to keep the tears out of her voice.

 

                “You know as well as I do that we don’t need a mile’s worth of stripped wire. Come get some dinner, for me? Please?” Erin hates the pleading in her voice, but it’s all she has left.

 

                “The angle is off.” As skilled as she is, she hasn’t been able to restore the pliers to their former glory. The blade had been damaged as well as the spring mechanism, and she knows she’ll never forgive herself if she can’t fix them. Her grandfather was fond of saying that once something was broken, it was never the same. It could be just as good, just as useful, but never the same. She remembers gentle hands covering hers and a voice like melting gravel telling her “ _45 degrees, Jills_.”

                “It’s got to be just right, Erin. Or they’re broken and useless.” _Like me._

 

New paragraph Erin tries her best not to say anything about the twenty other pairs of pliers scattered on various tables across the lab. This is obviously something of importance to Holtz, so she simply takes a seat on the stool specifically reserved for her and places a gentle hand over Holtzmann’s shaking ones.

 

                “You’re not going to be able to fix a thing until you eat something. Look at how badly your hands are shaking. You need energy.“ Her tone is gentle yet firm, and she eases the pliers from limp fingers. “I’ll make you Nutella crepes?” Crepes had been a staple in their relationship, mainly because she liked to make them and Holtz liked to eat them. Erin’s stomach sinks that much further as Holtz shakes her head.

 

                “Look, I’m fine. I don’t need you or Abby or Patty constantly checking up on me. I’m not a child and I’ll eat when I’m hungry, but right now I’m really busy and I don’t have time for anything else.”

 

                “Holtz, I-” Erin tries, but Holtzmann cuts her off with a pained grin.

 

                “Erin, genius stops for nothing.” Erin doesn’t even bother to take the bite out of her tone when she replies.

 

                “Yeah, well, genius is going to kill you, Holtz.” Before storming quietly out of the room. Holtzmann simply continues repairing her most prized possession, ignoring the tear drops that splatter on the tabletop and slicken her already trembling fingers.

 

*****

 

                “She won’t listen to me at all!” Erin huffs, re-arranging the flowers she’d brought to brighten Rebecca’s room as the tall woman watches from her bed, amused at Erin’s tendency to flutter when agitated.

 

                “You know, I’m going to have to have a talk with Jorge about what “No Visitors” means.” Even though Erin had clearly barged her way into the room anyway, and she obviously doesn’t hear Rebecca.

 

                “It’s like she’s tuning everything out and she won’t let anyone in. She’s building walls and I thought it was obvious that _I’m_ the only one who’s allowed to do that!” Erin’s rambling, not even comprehending the inane hypocrisy of her own words. “She won’t come out of the lab, and I can tell she hasn’t been sleeping and-” She cuts herself off, unwilling to verbalize what her mind is screaming, because that makes this real. Erin Gilbert doesn’t do ‘real’. She’s a theoretical physicist for god’s sake, _real_ is way outside of her comfort zone.

 

                “-and you miss her.” The mirth is unmistakable in Rebecca’s tone as she finishes Erin’s sentence.

 

                “Well… _Yeah_.” Erin scoffs petulantly, flinging herself into the lone chair, positioned in the corner of what would otherwise be described as a very austere room. There are no cards, and the only flowers are the ones rumpled bunch that Erin has provided. It’s clear that Dr. Gorin has found it easy to substitute work for the softer things in life.

 

                “You’re an easy read, Gilbert.” Gorin smiles, perfectly satisfied with her ability to unnerve Erin. It had been a personal rule that no one should become too comfortable in her presence. Complacency is dangerous, in her experience. At Erin’s look of displeasure, she actually laughs out loud. Maybe there is something to this whole ‘having visitors’ thing. “And she thinks it’s her fault, that’s why she’s pushing you away. That, and the fact that she’s scared you’ll run if you see what’s underneath the proverbial goggles. Really, she’s got every right to feel that way, because you haven’t exactly told her that you’re head over heels in love with her, have you?” There’s simply no way to describe the feeling when Erin’s jaw pops open and her eyes widen in shock…and ‘triumphant’ does it no justice. Rebecca Gorin just _loves_ fucking with people. “Like I said, you’re an easy read.” She can see Erin’s mind working at the speed of thought per picosecond, and _this_ is why she taught for so long: the sight of someone visibly working through the problem she’s set before them. Unfortunately, Erin doesn’t have the context to correctly work toward a solution. “Of course, if you say it now, she won’t register the meaning behind it. She’s too consumed in self-loathing. Something I personally never would have tolerated, but as you know, I’m not exactly in a state to do any ass kicking or pulling people out of rabbit holes. So it’s up to you. I would have preferred someone who didn’t fuss with her tweed every ten seconds, but it would appear you’re all I’ve got. You’re my eyes and ears, Gilbert, and you obviously love her almost as much as I do, so that fact alone makes me inclined to like you. Just don’t force her to act normally, because that will only make things worse.” The speech leaves her winded, and she’s feeling the first of the effects of the disease ravaging her from the inside out.

 

          Erin senses this and realizes that she has a rare opportunity to make herself heard to the fairly self-assured woman before her, “Holtz saved me from my past once, and you’re an idiot if you think that I won’t do everything in my power to do the same. We’re all haunted by something, and even if it takes me a thousand years, I will make sure she knows that nothing is her fault.”

 

         Rebecca opens her mouth, but Erin cuts back in. “Yes, I am fully aware that we will all be dead in a thousand years. But for right now, I am very much alive, and I’m in a fighting mood.” She can tell that Gorin approves by the thin smile and the spark that lights in her dark eyes, and this time, triumphant does adequately describe the feeling.

 

                “I like you better when you’re angry.” Translation: Reckless.

 

*****

 

She feels dizzy, and she knows that’s a bad sign, but she can’t bring herself to do anything about it. She may not know what’s next but her grandfather also taught her another in a long line of important lessons: when you’re stuck, go back to what you know. So she re-affixes the mental image of her automaton and flicks her welding mask back down into place, jaw set in grim determination. The original had been bulky, the product of a third-grader’s mangled blueprints and shaky soldering, but this is going to be a masterpiece. She’s calling him Gerald, after the man who saved her from her own mind before she knew she needed saving, and he’s going to accomplish the most important thing she may ever do, saving the world included. But all thoughts of brilliance and glory are flung into the ether as she feels soft hands wrap around her waist.

 

                “Hey. We’re going out to celebrate. Patty says you have no choice in the matter. She sounded pretty adamant about it, and I really wouldn’t want to disappoint her right now. Plus, I’m thinking of getting all dressed up.” Erin murmurs into her ear, and she can’t fight off the shudder that runs the length of her spine. Erin _never_ uses that voice. It pulls the first real smile in maybe three days onto her face, and she slowly de-gloves.

 

                “Only if you wear the black dress.” She teases, a spark of her usual self emerging, and Erin giggles. That’s the real Holtz, right there.

 

                “Only if you wear the leather jacket.” She can play this game too, and Reckless Erin has a Reckless plan, even if it is morally questionable. But really, what are morals besides a set of rules superimposed upon humanity by an arbitrary society. She presses a lingering kiss to the soft spot behind Holtz’s ear and saunters out of the lab, fully aware of Holtzmann’s gaze on her swinging hips.

 

                Gerald is going to have to wait.

 

*****

 

                Erin really goes all out, the new Reckless side of her prompting a low cut, strapless thing that clings like a second skin and a smoky-eye with liner sharp enough to kill a man. If she can’t drag Holtzmann away from the dark and twisty by being soft and gentle, she’ll have to do it by being loud and in-your-face. Granted, the academic in her cringes at the immense distance between knees and hemline, but there’s a distinct logic behind it and that’s enough to placate the apprehension, at least for the time being.

                She descends the stairs carefully, well aware that tripping in mile-high heels would sort of ruin the effect. Patty emits a low whistle and Abby’s jaw is resting somewhere between her shoes and the floor.

 

                “Gilbert cleans up _nice_.” Patty is giggling, a strange high pitched sound that’s a complete departure from her usual full-bodied cackle, and Abby appears to still be collecting herself, finally finding her voice.

 

                “Is that-“ Gesturing in Erin’s general direction. “-really necessary?” She’s not adjusting well to Erin’s new Reckless side, to Patty’s endless amusement.

 

                “Completely.” Erin smirks, a wink popping out of nowhere, and she totally gets why Holtz does this. Abby only serves to get more flustered, before muttering a disturbed ‘whatever.’ And marching out the door. Erin and Patty share a high five before Patty leans in and says,

 

                “I’m not kidding, girl.  You look bomb as fuck.” Erin blushes and focuses on teetering out the door without falling on her face. Holtz had agreed to meet them there, a club called Haunted, where the Ghostbusters’ names were permanently affixed to the top of the list in gold filigree. The cab-ride over is amusing, Abby seething in the middle as Patty cracks jokes and Erin feels more desirable than when she’d been called ‘an asset to modern physics’. Which leads to all kinds of dark thoughts about beauty and brains, but she refuses to go down that road when she’s got goals to fulfill.

               

 The bouncer gives her a smile and wink as they walk in, a first for her even though she knows it’s harmless. Stan is as gay as a two-dollar bill and he’s congratulated she and Holtzmann more than once. Tonight, the air feels different, like possibilities flood through her with every breath she takes and Reckless Erin is on _fire_. She downs two shots before they even sit down, and her compatriots shoot her a concerned glance.

 

                “Oh, let me live a little.” And tonight, she gives no fucks other than seeing Holtzmann laugh, _really_ laugh, for the first time in what feels like weeks, and if that takes alcohol and skimpy dresses, then her reservations fly out the window like dominoes in a hurricane. Her train of thought stops abruptly when she sees the object of her very thoughts slide through the door, smooth as satin.

 

                “At least one of us kept their end of the bargain.” She announces, fingering the buttons of Holtzmann’s jacket, true to request. Erin’s not wearing the aforementioned black dress, but Holtz doesn’t think she could care a single iota less; blood red is far better anyway, in her opinion. The legs that run for years certainly don’t make anything worse, and Erin is looking at her like she’s about to be eaten alive. If she were a religious man, she’d be sure she’s staring directly at the physical manifestation of sin. The only things missing are the horns. “Cheers.” Erin purrs, grabbing two shots off the bar before downing hers like a professional. So it’s going to be like _that_. Holtzmann follows suit before being dragged into a booth _just_ big enough to fit the four of them. Shoulders and thighs start friction fires and when rounds are ordered, stunned silence follows Erin’s request for tequila. She feels like a walking tornado and the vertigo puts wind in her veins and lightning in her bones. She’s got a rain dance in her head and if Holtz wants a storm she’s gonna have to come close and dance along. Tonight, she’s positively predatory, and she’ll be damned if she doesn’t _live_ for the way Holtzmann’s eyes roam her body like a fucking brushfire just _begging_ for a gust of wind. This is new, and her head is buzzing, heat and alcohol turning a tornado into a ticking time-bomb.

                The others are engrossed in some topic or other, so no one notices when she subtly switches to water. She may be a firework lit from both ends tonight, but she’s a sparkler with a goal in mind. Holtz is still throwing Jack back like it’s prohibition, and Erin gives Patty a subtle (not even close) nudge to take an all too sober Abby elsewhere. After multiple excuses and arguments, they head in the general direction of the dance floor, and _finally_ Erin can start the end phase. Holtz is leaning against her, fingers roaming the exposed skin of her thighs and Erin breaks the silence, doing her level best to sound trashed.

 

                “Holtz, I just wanna know.” She may have been a terrible liar her entire life, but she plays a great drunk.

 

                “Wanna know what?” Holtzmann is drunk enough not to care, but not so tanked that she’s incoherent. Erin places a gentle finger on the shot she’s about to take, and gives her a serious look.

 

                “I wanna know what’s _wrong_ , Jills.” There’s only one person on earth that has ever called her that and Holtz freezes, memories flipping through her mind like the after flashes of lightning.

 

_45 degree angles, Jills._

_Not too hot, Jills._

_Watch for the runoff, Jills._

_What’s next, Jills?_

                It’s enough to break the dam. Enough to force everything she’s been holding in flooding through the cracks. Enough to break the barrier and set her ghosts free. There have been plenty of people who’ve called her Holtzmann or Holtz or Jillian, but only one who ever called her Jills.

 

                “It’s mom’s fault.” She states, words only slightly slurred. “ _’Nobody wants a fat girl, Jillian.’_ ” She sneers in a bitter, mocking voice. “ _’Boys don’t like jiggly thighs and double chins, Jillian.’_ God I hated that name.” She pauses for another shot, grimacing slightly before letting out a breath to soothe the burn. “And dad was always too busy. Too much work to be done, money to be made. Bills to be paid, but no attention. Just ‘ _Listen to your mother, Jillian._ ’ Like parenting was a fucking joke and I was always their best punchline. So I graduated early and got the hell out and never looked back.” It’s a story Erin feels she could tell herself, if you substituted weight for hallucinations, and she _gets_ it. It resonates, maybe not the exact same way, or for the same reasons, but there’s a burning pit of coals in her stomach that has nothing to do with tequila, and everything to do with rage. Screw keeping her safe from their job, she has to keep Holtz safe from her past. “And Rebecca won’t see me of course, because I was nothing more than potential to her. She carried me through two semesters until I could carry myself because she wanted to pick my brain. That’s all anyone wants, to pick me apart until they see that there’s nothing worth saving. And so they died and I didn’t care. Never talked to them again. But Gramps, he got me, from the very first minute. Spent hours in the garage teaching me to strip wires and rebuild to toaster. He called me Jills, you know?” Erin didn’t know, but she was so raptly attuned to the words fighting their way out of Holtzmann that not knowing didn’t matter, maybe for the first time ever. “We built robots and go-carts and once, in the 8 th grade, we almost built a nuclear reactor before mom called the fire department. And he smelled like cinnamon and tobacco and grease and he was the only one I loved. And when things didn’t go right and I got frustrated, he would just take my chin and wipe away the tears and say, ‘ _What’s next, Jills?_ ’ But he’s gone, and Rebecca’s leaving, and you barely even laugh at my jokes anymore and everything is _wrong_.”

                The waterfall of new information churns in Erin’s head, and she’s rethinking that last shot because there’s so much to process and it feels a little sluggish. And she knows there will have to be real conversations later on, in the real world outside of the pulsing beat and the taste of whiskey, but right now there’s only one thing she knows she can do. Holtz is considering her empty shot glass when Erin grasps her chin, wiping away tears of frustration, and puts every ounce of love into her voice.

 

                “What’s next, Jills?”

 

*****

 

                They stumble laughing from the cab into the firehouse, shoes flung over Erin’s shoulder as she tries to dissuade Holtzmann from trying to climb the fire pole. They trip up stairs, giggling as they go, and _how_ Erin has missed this. They’d ditched the other two at the club, but she has faith in them not to wake up in a bathtub somewhere.

                Erin feels that her pillow-fort-building skills leave something to be desired, but it’s gonna have to do for now. It’s not until they’ve been watching the universe swirl around them for an hour, fingers intertwined and silent except for the occasional case of the giggles that break out every so often that Holtzmann’s eyes light up. She turns to Erin with a manic grin stretching her face in the best way and she gasps excitedly.

 

                “Gerald! I forgot about him!” She drags Erin to her feet, not an easy task considering their inebriated state, and shakes her by the shoulders. “You have to meet Gerald!” As with most post-midnight conversations with Holtzmann, Erin is left with more questions than answers, stumbling as she’s ushered from their pillow-y wonderland down the hall to the lab. Holtz leads her to an unusually organized table and points triumphantly. “ _This_ is Gerald!” It’s a heap of gears and decidedly dated technology, but she recognizes what she thinks might be the general form of a chair and maybe an arm, and things start clicking into place. “Gramps always said that sometimes where you’re going has to be where you’ve already been, only more polished, hence Gerald.” She beams at Erin, not fully expecting her to grasp the concept, but her jaw drops when Erin smiles.

 

                “It’s an automaton! Pardon, He.” She draws closer, noting the paper roller she can only assume came from a disassembled typewriter, but she keeps theories to herself.

 

                “I could kiss you right now.” Holtz says, shock still evident on her face and Erin chuckles.

 

                “You could. Or you could tell me what Gerald here does…” She’s not trying to pry, but the curious voice in her head wants to know if her suspicions are correct.

 

                “Um…it’s kind of a secret?” Holtzmann winces, remembering how well her last secret had gone over.

                “Okay.” Erin says with a ghost of a smile. “In that case, the kissing sounds great.”

 

 *****

 

                “You the designated mom-friend! How am I supposed to know where they went?” Patty’s voice carries well enough through the crowded room, but Abby has to shout to be heard.

 

                “I told you we shouldn’t have left them unattended! They’re probably making out in the bathroom or something at this point!” She had never been in favor of this whole plan to begin with, but now they’ve lost half their team, and she’s getting very cross with the situation, which makes Patty that much more amused, and it’s a vicious cycle, really.

 

                “So what?! They’re consenting adults! Why you wiggin’ out? They are perfectly capable of taking a cab back to the firehouse.”

 

                “They better have! Because if they wake up in an alley somewhere, I don’t wanna hear about it!” Abby has not had nearly enough alcohol to deal with this shit.

 

                “In the meantime, there’s a guy over there who’s been eyeing you for like twenty minutes, so you are gonna go let him buy you a drink.” Patty Tolan, constant lookout for eye-candy for her feisty friend.

 

 *****

 

                “Holtz, I know Gerald is super important, but can we take a break? I know this amazing 24-hour diner, and it’s been like, 18 hours since I’ve eaten anything.” Erin tries to be as gentle as possible, knowing what she now does, but she’s seriously hungry and when you live with three scientists and a particularly dedicated historian, the fridge is never particularly well stocked. Holtz’s head shoots up and all motion freezes.

               

                “I’m so sorry. Guess I got a little carried away…” She motions to the sprocket she’s been filing for 45 minutes. It’s a calculated side-step; a way to escape the conversation about her eating habits -or lack thereof. The real conversation that doesn’t involve whiskey and makeup and word-vomiting, but Erin lets it slide. Instead, she tries a different tactic

 

                “They’ve got the most amazing waffles I’ve ever had, and Larry always gives me extra whipped cream.” She develops a far-away look in her eyes and a conspiratorial grin, just as her stomach lets out a biblically loud gurgle. They laugh, and with as much as Holtzmann has shared with her tonight, she feels obligated to share one of her hideaway spots as well.

 

                “If the Lady wants waffles, then waffles she shall receive!” Holtz bows deeply, offering a hand to a snorting Erin and waltzing her through the lab door and into the night.

 

 

 *****

 

                “I swear to God, if they’re not here, I’m putting a GPS on Erin’s phone.” Abby slurs. Patty cackles as they nearly fall through the firehouse door. She’d succeeded in getting Abby suitably tipsy and her small compatriot even had several numbers written on her arm, surprisingly enough.

 

                “You do realize that phones these days come with a GPS capability, right?” Despite her apparent role as babysitter for the night, Patty’s having the time of her life, especially since fun seems to be in short order these days. Abby, still Abby even if she’s full of Peppermint Schnapps, simply huffs in annoyance and barrels through the living room, although she’s rapidly losing steam, and after about a half a second of consideration, she changes course to collapse onto their monster of a sofa instead, softly whispering,

 

                “You’ll find ‘em, Patty. You’re a good looker.”

 

                “I’m not even gonna touch that one.” Patty laughs, gently covering her now unconscious friend with a throw blanket and trying not to laugh at the volume of snoring coming from such a tiny person.

 

 *****

 

                “You have whipped cream on your nose. It’s totally hot.” Holtzmann points out with an eyebrow wiggle.

 

                “Oh, my god! Holtz! You should have told me!” Erin gasps, rubbing furiously at the tip of her nose. An act the becomes futile when Holtz dips her index finger into the truly magnificent pile of whipped cream that dwarfs the waffle beneath it, only to rub it directly onto Erin’s recently polished nose. Erin laughs, leaving it for the time being before shooting Holtzmann her most seductive look. Coupled with the effect of her surprisingly durable makeup and the low-cut dress she hadn’t bothered to change out of leaves Holtz speechless. Which is why she doesn’t notice Erin swiping her thumb through the whip and only has a second of realization before Erin wipes it across her forehead, mouthing,

 

                “Simbaaaa…” In a low voice. This reduces Erin into an uncontrollable bout of giggles that freezes instantly when she snorts, full on and loud as can be. Her hands come up to her face in horror and silence ensues.

 

                “Did you just-” Holtz starts, trying and failing miserably to keep the laughter out of her voice.

 

                “No. I did not. You heard nothing.” Erin’s in full denial mode, but as soon as she sees the grin crack on Holtzmann’s face, another snort pops out, followed by another until tears stream down her face and Holtz is doubled over in their booth. Luckily, beside an older-looking gentleman enjoying a nice piece of pie and a cuppa joe at 4 am, they’re alone. It’s the most Erin has seen Holtz smile in days, but she sobers at the thought and the moment has passed.

 

                “So this is your place, huh?” Holtz gives the diner a once before smiling that smile she reserves only for Erin. “I like it. Not something I’d have pegged for you.” It’s gentle, she’s aware that something important is being shared with her in return, and she can appreciate that. 

 

                “Yeah. I used to come here all the time when the assholes at Columbia got to be too much. I’ve had my best breakthroughs in this booth, actually.” Holtzmann is touched by Erin’s willingness to share her personal haven, given her usual private nature, and unfortunately for her, she realizes it’s time for that sober talk.

 

                “Look-“ She starts at the same time Erin says,

 

                “I get it, Holtz. I really do. But I need you to stick around for a while, and that involves eating something once in a while, okay? Even if it’s hard, it’s something we can work on. But I need you to try, and to stop blaming yourself for things that you have no control over.” The word need rattles around in Holtz’s mind before shooting down her spine like fire.

 

                “I know it’s gotten out of control, but if you knew the things that go on in my head, you’d understand why I’m nauseous all time and it hurts in so many more ways than one, because no one will ever want me the way I am. I thought Rebecca understood that, but now I realize that she only saw me for my brain, and she’s the only one who could ever make it worth it, and it’s killing me. I thought I found a family who would accept that, but everyone’s always tiptoeing around the fact that we’re all fucked up, in some way or another, so we can’t even talk about it. And you…” She trails off, not able to verbalize the sheer amount of hope she had found in Erin, only to have her try to fix Holtz’s problems instead of accepting them.

 

                “And me.” Reckless Erin is out in full force, the pep talk of the century about to spring forth from her lips like Athena from the mind of Zeus. “I see all of you. I see the crazy and the hopes and the insecurities pouring through the cracks, and I see the fear and the intense level of fucked up you’ve reached in that glorious, insane mind of yours, but you know what? I wanna see it all. I want pillow forts and dancing in the rain and all that sappy shit, obviously, but I also want the days when you’re too busy redefining the laws of physics to remember that I even exist. I want to see the tears and the smiles and the full on break downs…I want to experience you as you are, and I don’t want to fix you because you’re not broken, Holtzmann. You just need a new faraday cage and someone to help you weld it on properly. I just want you to be okay, and I want you to be okay with yourself. Because when the lights go out, you’re my portable universe.” Erin is leaning slightly over the table by now, unwavering eye contact making Holtz feel truly seen for the first time in recent memory, and really, Larry’s Diner at 4:30 am is not the place she wants to break down, but she’s not ruling it out as a possibility. But Erin’s apparently not done. “So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m fairly sure I have an idea that may help you ease back into things. It’ll be the same as the grounding technique you use on me, but in reverse. You’ll eat one thing, then two, then three, and so on and so forth. And I’m not expecting it to work immediately, but I do know that you are definitely going to eat half of this waffle as number one.” Holtz’s stomach growls as if to prove her point, and Holtz dutifully picks up a fork, but not before smearing more whipped cream on Erin’s nose with a spritely grin.

 

*****

 

                “I think I’ve figured out a way to help with the situation, but it would still be easier if you just let her come visit. She loves you, in her own weird way, and she thinks you’re shutting her out because you only cared for her brain, not the lost, lonely girl underneath.” Erin is constantly rearranging Rebecca’s things, so often in fact, that Dr. Gorin has learned to ignore it completely. She’s growing to like, maybe even adore, this little physicist who has a penchant for trying to save the world, even if it’s just one engineer at a time. That, and she refuses to stop barging her way in.

 

                “We’ve had this discussion, Erin. I can’t have her see me like this.” Rebecca wheezes. The cancer is metastasizing to her lungs and she coughs. Breathing is becoming more difficult, but she’s not yet lost that constant air of amusement.

 

                “Yeah, well, maybe if you could get over yourself, it would save us all a lot of heartache.” The first time Erin had come, she’d been timid and seeking advice, but the imposing woman in the hospital bed no longer intimidates her. That, and Reckless Erin wants to get a rise out of the normally unflappable Dr. Gorin. She realizes that this may be the feeling Holtzmann has when she interacts with Erin herself, and the thought infuses her with inexplicable warmth.

 

                “Maybe, but hubris is something I tend to cling to.” She answers thoughtfully, much to Erin’s disappointment. So she contents herself to listen to several more hours of Rebecca’s recounting of her time with Holtzmann. Erin listens, noting the warm tone and the faint smile that glazes her lips as she speaks. She realizes that their relationship is far more nuanced than she ever could have imagined. Her own mentor, Dr. Filmore, had cast her aside as soon as she became something other than a facsimile of academia, asset to modern physics or not. But then something Rebecca says stops her thoughts cold in their tracks.

 

                “I was the first person she ever came out to, and while it was an honor, I had known from the moment I saw her. But you, that’s an interesting conundrum. I can’t quite figure out how you ended up factoring into this equation.”

 

                “Okay, obvious insult aside, you were the first? How is that even possible?” Erin is reeling. There’s no way that it hadn’t been until her second year of college that someone had gotten close enough for Holtz to reveal that. Erin had come out to her parents as bisexual in middle school, but it was just another thing they thought they could therapy away, so she can relate, especially with what she’s heard of Holtzmann’s childhood. “You’re the only one who can call her Jillian, you know?” It’s cavalier, not meant to make any kind of statement, but Rebecca’s reaction is interesting. She actually looks chagrined for a moment before a guilty smile forces its way through the cracks.

 

                “That’s my fault, actually.” She pauses, as if in preparation of revealing something deeply personal about herself. “Her mother…should not have been a mother. Jillian hated that name from the moment I met her, but I was a professor and I’m not one to give students special privileges. It wasn’t until she collapsed in the lab that I learned about everything at play, and I was the one to receive the call. I was her emergency contact because she had no one else, and once she told me her story, in much the same setting as we’re in now, I realized that I’d played a major factor in her relapse. And I can’t sit here and honestly tell you that I hadn’t noticed something going on, but I refused to get involved in students’ personal lives. But by the time I got to the hospital and heard the whole story, I tried to -uh- apologize?” She says the word as if it’s never come out of her mouth before, which Erin thinks is a distinct possibility. “I tried to explain myself, but she stopped me and said, ‘Dr. Gorin, it would be weird if I started calling you Rebecca, right? So just call me Jillian. It’s okay coming from you.’ And so I waited with her; she was so tiny and alone in this world, and when she was finally cleared for research again, I ate dinner with her in the lab every single day for two semesters straight. It wasn’t like I had a family of my own anyway. And so she became mine, and I became hers, and that’s why I can’t have her see me like this. She’s lost a mother she didn’t love, why should she be forced to watch another die before her very eyes? One she might actually care for.” When she finishes, there are tears in her eyes, and Erin would be lying if she said there weren’t any in hers.

 

                “She does.” Her voice is gravelly, and Erin clears her throat. “Care for you. And refusing to see her is doing more harm than good. For you both.”

 

*****

 

                Gerald is broken and Holtz doesn’t know why. She sits in the lab, occasionally letting Abby feed her peanut M&M’s (an excellent source of protein and energy) and running furious hands through hair that is much less tightly bound than usual. Something is wrong with his arm, and she can’t figure out for the life of her what it is. She thinks back to those hazy days of toasters and circuits boards, of gentle hands guiding scraped knuckles along belt sanders and welding rod, and it hits her like a ton of bricks.

 

                _“Do you know how an elbow works, Jills?” She shakes her head in dissent, blonde ringlets bobbing with the motion. “There are three bones and they come together like this. Which means that we need extra gears in order to make the arm fully mobile. Otherwise he’d only be able to go up and down, not side to side.” And he tousles her hair before showing her how to screw in additional sprockets to fit their careful measurements._

                “ _Elbows_! How did I forget elbows!?” She shouts, startling Erin, who’s so involved in her work that her face is actually resting on the stack of papers she’s accumulated, and causing Patty to drop her book. Abby remains unperturbed, having worked with Holtz in the lab long enough to expect these outbursts. Erin raises her head, paper adorably peeling off her cheek in the process, and Patty grins.

 

                “Did you know that the word ‘elbow’ was invented by Shakespeare? He needed a word to describe the place where the bicep and forearm meet, so he just made one up.” She says with characteristic enthusiasm.

 

                “Yes, Patty, I was aware.” Abby replies noncommittally, refusing to acknowledge her colleagues’ various outbursts further, and returning to the blueprints delicately taped to the drafting table before her. Erin had initially been surprised by how involved Abby was in the construction of the new containment units, but she’d quickly reminded herself that there’s nothing her friend can’t teach herself to do.

 

                “No, no, I mean that Gerald needs elbows! That’s what I forgot. He needs a full range of motion or he’ll feel like a cripple, and we can’t have that.” Images of her grandfather’s wheelchair -childhood polio, she’d been told before she was old enough to know what epidemics were- but she quickly pushes them from her mind. Abby tosses her another M&M (only the yellow ones) which she expertly catches in her mouth. It’s a grade school trick that’s coming in very handy lately. Sure, they still make her a little nauseated, but it’s a step in the right direction.  Erin finishes unsticking her work from her face, eliciting a deep cackle from Holtzmann at the collection of smudged equations under the contour of her cheekbone.

 

                “What?” She asks, confused, but Holtz just grins and winks.

 

                “Not a thing, Babycakes.” She discretely points and Patty bursts into boisterous laughter, before Abby growls,

               

                “Oh, for god’s sake!” And wipes the ink from Erin’s cheek, serving only to smudge it further. When she licks her thumb, though, Erin uses Holtz as a shield and yells,

 

                “Oh _hell_ no! Get away from me, _Mom_!” And things kind of feel alright. After Abby is done chasing Erin around with a paper towel, and the only thing left is a smudged infinity on the edge of her jaw, she returns to face Gerald, Holtz at her shoulder.

 

                “He needs elbows?” She can grasp the general idea, but has no idea what elbows actually have to do with anything.

 

                “Does anyone know the exact anatomical composition for the joint where the humerus and ulna meet?” Holtz asks no one in particular.

 

                “Baby, y’all not that kinds of doctors.” Patty points out and Erin snorts. Holtzmann looks downtrodden, knowing nothing about joints, until Patty quips offhandedly, “Think I got a copy of Gray’s Anatomy around here somewhere…” Which incites the greatest book-related manhunt since the Nazi era, and when Patty finally pulls the dusty tome -because there is no other word to describe a book that size- Holtz is sent into myocardial infarctions (they know because they look it up) by the sheer length of the table of contents, so Erin is forced to conduct a second search through ten pages of the most technically preposterous vernacular she’s ever seen, just to find the page about the joint between the humerus and ulna -and Erin is a particle physicist, difficult diction is her profession. But they get there eventually, and Holtzmann’s eyes literally cross in confusion.

 

                “Okay, I’m just gonna say, what in the _bloody_ hell is a Lesser Sigmoid Cavity?”

 

                “See, this why y’all ain’t that kind of doctor.” Patty muses. “It’s the part where the ulna connects with the humerus.” Patty points to the diagram without looking up from her own book, while the other three gape at her in shock. Erin wasn’t even aware she was paying attention to their conversation. “Oh, don’t _tell_ me you don’t know how joints work!” She stands, leaning over the table to where they’re huddled over the goliath of a book. Holtz scoffs and turns away while Erin discretely shakes her head and Abby simply walks back to her perfectly understandable blueprints. “Literally, you guys are doctors!”

 

                “Of Particle Physics!” Erin protests and Holtzmann grins.

 

                “You ain’t qualified to be a doctor of anything other than Crazy.” Patty addresses Holtz with a loving smile.

 

                “Technically it’s Nuclear Engineering.” Holtz edges in, but Patty laughs.

 

                “Like I said, crazy.”

 

*****

 

                After about an hour of discussion about how a Lesser Sigmoid Cavity would translate in terms of gears and sprockets, Patty looks at Erin with a particularly gleeful light in her eyes.

 

                “Uh, Holtzy? You know the elbow is a hinge joint, right?” She’s resisting the urge to laugh.

 

                “Yup. The Greater and Lesser Sigmoid Cavities of the ulna fit into the Olecranon Fossa by way of Trochlear Surface.” Holtzmann rattles off merrily, continuing to grind a length of steel into the proper shape.

 

                “What do hinges do, Holtz?” Patty asks patiently, hands on hips, the very image of calm omniscience.

 

                “Open and close things.” Holtzmann still isn’t getting the point, but Erin is suddenly struck by the fist of Henry Gray himself.

 

                “Shoulder!” She shouts, almost exactly the same tone as Holtzmann hours prior, and much to Abby’s growing annoyance and Patty’s delight. What’s priceless though, is the look on Holtz’s face as realization dawns.

 

                “Oh _fuck_ me!” She slams her file on the table loud enough to drown out Erin’s peeping ‘ _okay_.’

               

                “Baby girl, you don’t need an elbow -well, you do- but for the problem I think you’re trying to solve here, you gon’ need to consult The Book again. And y’all gon’ hafta do it your own damn selves because I am a big lady in need of a big dinner.”

 

                So they order pizza and Holtzmann eats a whole slice without any prompting from Erin whatsoever, and she’s really proud. The kind of proud that makes her fingers shake when they brush against Holtz’s; the kind of proud that reminds her there is an entire galaxy in a box upstairs just for her, and that she falls asleep with the lights off because she knows that Andromeda is watching over her. It’s the kind of proud that makes her think she might totally be in love, if she believed in that sort of thing.

                Sure, Holtzmann makes her crazy in all the best ways, and she can’t physically bear the thought of not having her around, but Erin believes in science and she’s severed all novel thoughts from the beating muscle they call a heart by now. She believes in lust and connections and chemicals, but she’s not ready to believe in love. Not even Reckless Erin is ready for that.

 

                “So…what does Gerald do, exactly?” Abby has feigned disinterest for so long they’d almost started to believe it, but she cannot keep her inner need-to-knowitall reigned in any longer. Holtz has picked up on it for hours though, and she refuses to end Abby’s obvious torture.

 

                “You’ll know once he’s finished, won’t you?” It’s accompanies by a vicious grin and Erin nearly snorts water up her nose. Patty says something about living in a firehouse full of crazy people, and Abby just scowls.

 

                “I guess I will.” She replies curtly, before picking every single mushroom off of her slice, even though she refuses to order supreme without them. In college, Erin had tried to reason with her, but there was some sort of neuroticism behind it. _‘It doesn’t taste the same!’_ She had argued, but also refuted Erin’s argument that if she didn’t like mushrooms, why on earth would she want to infuse the whole pizza with that flavor? There was just no reasoning with some people.

 

*****

 

                Shoulders, it would turn out, are equally as complicated as elbows, with added bones thrown into the mix. Abby’s gone to bed to “get away from you insufferable people.” And Patty has a hot date tonight, so it’s just Erin and Holtzmann in the lab.

 

                “I don’t know _how_ to forge a scapula!” Holtz grunts in frustration. “I’m an engineer not a sculptor! And I’d need equipment from, like, the 1700’s and my latest check on EBay didn’t yield all that many results for ’10-pound anvil’!” It’s one of Holtzmann’s few moments of self-doubt (not to be confused with self-loathing) but Gerald needs to be perfect, and she’s so clearly not.

 

                “Maybe then we try another approach. What if, instead of actually building a fully functional shoulder, we use your previous approach to create a facsimile of a shoulder that functions appropriately for what you need? I mean, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You’re only human.” Erin blushes, feeling as though she’s overplayed her hand. She’s been feeling fairly reserved -scientifically speaking- since the DeBye incident, and most of their alone time has been emotionally charged since the news about Dr. Gorin. She misses the feeling of waking up with blonde curls splayed across her pillow, limbs wrapped up in tangled confusion, and the subtle sound of Holtzmann’s breathing almost blocking out the softer pulse of her heartbeat. Suddenly, she finds herself getting more and more enraged at Rebecca for letting her own pride and vanity get in the way of letting Holtz heal, a process that is clearly ongoing. It reminds her of her own fears and apprehensions and something about it rankles her to no end.

 

                “Erin, you just may be a genius.” Holtz is distracted as she flies around her creation like some fairy of engineering, sprinkling nuclear dust over Gerald to bring him to life.

 

                “I…um…actually am a genius? I mean, by IQ standards, not to be self-aggrandizing-“ Erin’s rambling is cut off by soft lips on hers.

 

                “I know. And thank you. For not leaving me alone.”

 *****

 

           The next time Erin shows up is one of Rebecca’s bad days; she’s sitting higher, visibly struggling to breathe.

 

                “Doc says I’ve got two months, four if I do chemo, but I’ve experienced enough radiation for ten lifetimes, so _that’s_ not happening.”

 

                “You’re being a dick, you know.” Erin has no sympathy, just the enraged belief that Rebecca’s vanity is hurting Holtzmann.

 

                “Look whose balls just dropped.” Rebecca wheezes, looking impressed.

 

                “If this is some weird attempt to, like, save your pride, or dignity, or _whatever_ …It’s selfish and you’re hurting the people who care about you.” She says people because she’s a part of this now too. She’s spent days listening and laughing and arguing and fighting with this woman because Holtz cares about her, and now Erin does too. But that doesn’t mean she won’t say her piece.

 

                “It’s not selfish.” Rebecca starts before Erin’s outrage bubbles over and she interrupts.

 

                “The _hell_ it’s not!” She paces angrily. “This is all about how you want to be remembered and how you don’t want to seem weak, and you’re cutting her out because, in your mind, this is all about _you_!” Finally, _finally_ , she seems to get under the thick skin of the unflappable Dr. Rebecca Gorin.

 

                “I’m protecting _her_!” She snaps, sitting fully upright. “I don’t want to let her see me like this because I don’t want it to hurt _her_! She is the closest thing I have ever had to a daughter, and I refuse to force her to watch me wither away to nothing when that’s _exactly_ what brought us together in the first place. It’s for her sake, not mine, so don’t you traipse in here with your bleeding heart and hot feelings and tell me that _I’m_ selfish!” Even Reckless Erin is taken aback by the ferocity with which Rebecca speaks. She knew that the refusal to see Holtz was borne out of some sort of misguided affection or at the very least, vanity and pride, but she’d never once stopped to think about how Holtzmann would be affected by her mentor’s weakened state. And Rebecca was right: she was wasting away in a very similar fashion to the way Holtz had been wasting away.

 

                “But she’s not the same…” These words do not come from the mouth of the same woman, the woman who -mere moments prior- had been ready to wheel the hospital bed all the way to the firehouse if necessary. These words come from a woman who is scared of the repercussions of the known and scared of the unknown itself.

 

                “She’ll never be the same.” Rebecca speaks gently, knowing her soft words will likely cut her begrudged friend to the core.

 

                Erin loves Holtz. Holtz loves Rebecca. Rebecca will die. Logic.

 

*****

 

Erin keeps disappearing, and Abby knows where to. What she doesn’t know is whether to be angry or touched, but she’s sure as hell pissed that her best friend refuses to confide in her, so Abby does what Abby does best, and corners her when she’s alone and vulnerable.

 

“So…you’ve been to see Dr. Gorin.” She states casually, alert for any sign of Erin’s reaction. “How’s she doing?” She gets a perverse sense of satisfaction from the way Erin’s eyes widen and she sips her tea, spluttering everywhere.

 

“Sorry, that is just _really_ hot.” And the feeling dies. “She’s doing alright, although it’s metastasizing to her lungs so they think she’s got about two months left, four if she does the chemo, but of course, she’s refusing on the grounds that she’s had radiation coursing through her veins since the late 90’s and adding to that really isn’t necessary. So she’s basically a bundle of joy.” Abby is used to Erin hiding behind walls and excuses, not this open, transparent explanation she seems perfectly willing to give.

 

“And what about Holtzmann?” Most of the wind has been taken from the billowing sail of her interrogation ship, so she cuts to the chase.

 

“I think we’re almost there. She’s doing this to protect Holtz, at least in her mind, but I’ve been explaining that it’s really not, and I think she’s coming around. She was the one to pull Holtz out of it the first time around, and she seems to think that I have to be the one to do it this time. But I think she’s wrong; we all need to do it. We’re a family now, right? And that includes Rebecca.” Erin finishes firmly, giving Abby a hug before exiting the kitchen to head up and assist Holtz with putting the final touches on Gerald. Abby stands alone, completely flummoxed and generally questioning her approach to her friendship and the ‘family’ as Erin put it.

 

“Well, that went well.” Patty snickers from the doorway. Abby shoots her a dark look before she continues. “Erin has changed a lot too, you know that right?”Remove She and Holtzy, they’re good for each other. They pull each other outta their respective heads, and Holtzy boosts Erin’s confidence while Erin takes Holtzy’s crazy and makes it beautiful in a way it wasn’t before. And they don’t even realize it. Erin’s right, we a family now, but you don’t always gotta be the mom. Sometimes, you can just be Abby: big, brilliant, and the main source of energy behind everything we do.” She pauses before adding, “We need you, but if you don’t quit interrogating unsuspecting team members, Imma smack you again, ghost or no ghost.” The love in Patty’s voice is unmistakable, and Abby has to concede that she may just be a little bit right.

 

“Can I be the concerned older sister?” She quips with a smile.

 

“Girl, you already the concerned older sister. But right now, you gotta be the leader because we got a bust!”

 

*****

 

So, the Annex of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art wouldn’t exactly be the most surprising of places for ghosts to manifest, but it’s by no means your average bust. The Mona Lisa (who has clawed free of her frame) is currently trying to eat the curator whilst screaming “ _I don’t smile_!” in rapid Italian, and the replica of David is engaged in an all-out-knock-down brawl with The Thinker.

 

“Less brain, more brawn!” Holtzmann cries gleefully, dodging rolling marble like she’s in The Matrix.

 

“I thought we agreed: No puns on the job!” Abby screams back, barely heard through the clatter of marble on plaster on marble, glass cases shattering in showers of deadly rain. Here, the Ghostbusters face an ethical dilemma: they can either bust the way they normally would, and destroy some of the world’s most precious artifacts, or they can find a way to lure the ghosts from their valuable hosts. The only problem with the latter is that they’ve got no idea how to make that happen.

 

“That’s a conversation you had with yourself, Abby! Plus, they make it more fun!” Holtz snarks as she flies by, open containment chamber in one hand.

Erin dodges a blow from a rather disgruntled figurine of Hemingway before she has a shock of an idea.

 

“ _Holtz, I need you here ASAP_!” She shouts above the din. “Patty and Abby, cover us, _for the love of god!_ ” They fall into formation quickly as Erin kneels to the ground, DeBye resting before her.

 

“What’s the plan, Stan?” Holtzmann asks casually; as if all hell were not literally breaking lose around them.

 

“Can you be serious for like _two seconds_?!” Erin snaps. Holtz gives her best salute and Erin rolls her eyes. Asking Holtz to be serious is like asking Patty not to wear hoop earrings. “I need you to disable the infrared chamber and rewire it to add power to the EMP radiation unit. I’d do it but we don’t have the time.” The words are clipped, staccato orders; she has an idea that she knows will work, but she’s mentally preparing herself for the inevitable fallout.

 

“Making a supercharged EMP that will shock the apparitions out of their corporeal hosts! Nice one, Gilbert!” She cracks open the casing, making quick work of the mass of wires erupting from the open panel. “Don’t disturb the nitrogen circulator…” She mutters as she works, hands a blur of pliers and wire caps. “Done!” She shouts just as a particularly angry and freakish Matisse smashes through a 16th century model airplane inches from Erin’s head.

 

“ _Abby, what are you doing, getting coffee?!_ ” Erin shouts over her shoulder. She watches as Holtz replaces the panel with lightning speed before closing her eyes to quell the rising tide of panic wreaking havoc through her mind. Holtzmann looks at her then, realization written all over her face like chalk on a blackboard. There are no windows in the Annex of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

 

“This will blow every fuse in the building, maybe the block…” Her words drop like broken eggshells, like she doesn’t know if Erin has reached this conclusion yet herself.

 

“Yep.” Erin replies, face blank with grim determination, shouldering the reformed DeBye with a strength she didn’t know she possessed. A yelp from Patty’s direction forces her finger onto the trigger. Holtzmann at her back, she fires into the pandemonium. Paintings fall to the floor as the very air ripples with electricity, and there’s a brilliant flash before swirling darkness envelops the massive hall. The inly lights emanate from the proton packs and the pulsating apparitions themselves. They’ve been up against worse, in direr circumstances, but Erin is compromised. The ghouls have been freed from their pristine prisons (although the Mona Lisa is now grimacing) but Erin can’t help the wave of nausea that rushes through her at the absence of light. She stands, pistol at the ready, and this time it’s different. This time she’s armed. She’s far from helpless, and grounded in newfound confidence, she dives into the action. Ghost after ghost erupt before her, sucked into containment units like mist in the morning sun, but she feels herself slipping. Holtzmann is at her back, but a near miss shakes her to the core. It’s creeping into her bloodstream and she has to blink to clear unwanted tears from her eyes. She’s shaking violently, vibrating almost, and Holtz can feel it. She’s rarely felt helpless in matters not directly related to her own mind, but watching Erin dissolve in front of her sends true fear rippling through her limbs and down her spine. She’s wracking her mind for ways to light the room when a number rips its way out of her throat.

 

“ _5!_ ” She bellows. No reaction from Erin, but Abby shouts from across the room.

 

“What the _fuck_ , Holtzmann?!” She’s got no time for that, she knows only aim, fire, order.

 

“ _5!_ ” She screams again. “ _As loud as you can, Erin_!”  Finally, the paralyzed woman behind her erupts into movement. Forcing another ghost into an open canister, she screams into the darkness.

 

“ _David_!” Step. “ _The Thinker_!” Step. “ _Hemingway_!” Step.  “ _Mona Lisa_!” Step.  “ _Monet_!” Holtz follows her footwork seamlessly, letting her lead in this dance of death and darkness.

 

“ _4!_ ” Holtz cries.

 

“ _Pistol! Jumpsuit! Floor_!” She pauses, intentionally pressing her back to Holtzmann. “ _Holtzmann_!” Patty catches on quickly, calling from across the room.

 

“ _3!_ ”

 

“ _Breaking glass! Proton gun! Abby yelling ‘DIE MOTHERFUCKER’!_ ” Holtz giggles a little at that.

 

“ _2!_ ” Abby gasps as she chases a floating artist armed with a chisel across their field of vision.

 

“ _Ionization! Oil paint!_ ” Erin is so focused on her answers that the busting is automatic, proton pack warm with either use or radiation, and she feels electric. Who cares if it’s dark? She’ll light up the whole damn city.

 

“ _1!_ ” Holtzmann calls into Erin’s ear as the two remaining monsters get caught in proton streams and are slowly sucked into captivity. The closest one has just enough energy and vitriol to spew ectoplasm all over an unsuspecting Erin.

 

“ _Goddamnit! Ectoplasm_!” She screams into the black hall, and then it’s over. Holtzmann is ushering her out of the building and into blessed daylight.

 

“That was so badass, Babycakes.” She whispers, pulling Erin into a full bodied hug and giving her a triumphant kiss on the cheek before pulling away abruptly and wiping her mouth furiously. “Eugh! Bad idea! _Bad_ idea!” But the disgusting taste of ectoplasm is completely erased from her mind when she hears Erin giggle beside her. She expected a meltdown, even a little one, but she’d never in a million years have expected laughter, knowing what she knows about Erin and darkness.

 

“You just _ate_ ectoplasm.” She chortles, doubled over next to Holtz, before full on snorting, which just adds to the madness. However, their moment is somewhat ruined when Abby runs by whooping and Patty follows, cackling with glorious abandon.

 

“Come on, _Babycakes_.” Erin says. “Looks like the party bus is leaving, with or without us.”

 

*****

 

They’re all too wiped to celebrate properly, and Erin is too wired to do anything of substance, so they order take out and retreat to their various niches in the firehouse to recuperate. Erin twirls aimlessly on a stool, munching thoughtfully on her Mongolian Beef as Holtz tinkers with her automaton before a question strikes her.

 

“Why is he called Gerald?” There’s an airy, whimsical quality to her voice, like she’s somewhere far away, tethered to the lab only by the stool upon which she’s perched, as if she were a bird ready to fly away.

 

“My grandfather was named Gerald.” Holtz answers simply, letting her words float toward Erin on the same plane she seems to be at.

 

“Oh.” She’s floating away.

 

“He taught me almost everything I know.” Something about this phrase seems to snap Erin back into present place and time. “And when I was a kid, he knew everything.” Holtzmann continues casually.

 

“Wait. I thought you left all your family behind as soon as you could? I thought you only had your parents?” Erin is confused, and confusion has always made her blunt, but Holtz takes it in stride.

 

“He lived with us ever since I can remember. He had polio as a kid, so my mom spent a lot of time ‘taking care of him’, but he knew everything there was to know about engineering. He taught me how to strip wires when I was five, how to weld when I was eight, and how to build toasters that shot waffles across the room when I was twelve. For my third grade science fair, we built an automaton, and whenever I’d get frustrated or something didn’t work right, he would take my hands and say ‘ _If we don’t know how to go forward, we look back to what we know until we find the solution, Jills.’_ He also taught me never to refuse help, but I was never any good with that one.” She’s almost finished wiring the last of the pieces into place, Gerald’s purpose still a secret, and when she speaks again, her voice is full of grit and determination. “Go see Rebecca again. Tell her that I’m coming tomorrow, whether she likes it or not.” And with a flourish only Holtzmann could pull off, she dances over to grab the container out of Erin’s hands and shovel a large piece of meat into her face, nearly missing her mouth in the process. And the taste of salt and onions and MSG doesn’t make her even the slightest bit nauseous.

 

“Okay.” Erin replies, blushing at Holtzmann’s wide smile, not even caring how everyone and their mother knew it was Dr. Gorin she’d been going to see.

 

*****

 

“It’s out of the question!”

 

“I’m not saying I support it, I’m just telling you it’s happening. Don’t kill the messenger.” Erin has been arguing with Rebecca for the better part of an hour, and they’re getting nowhere. “It’s not going to send her into a full-blown relapse. She already knows you’re dying. We’re past that point already. I watched her eat eight fried wontons for lunch today without even so much as a grimace, and coming from experience, the imagination is always so much worse than the reality. Holtz is coming and she’s prepared, so you had better be. And I don’t want to see any of the coughing, pity party bullshit you put on for Jorge, just so he’ll come in here more often.” Rebecca laughs, a genuine, surprised thing that erupts unexpectedly.

 

“You noticed that?” It was true, she had been complaining and coughing more often than was strictly necessary, but what can she say? He has muscles and she still has eyes. “Well, I’m not dead _yet_!” She pouts and Erin smiles. She can see why Holtzmann loves this woman: she’s smart and she has a wicked sense of humor. And Erin had come to see her as a part of their family. She can’t claim the mentor capacity that Holtz can, but there’s a level of companionship that she hadn’t expected to establish. But Rebecca Gorin is going to die, and now Erin is forced to deal with that as well. “Don’t expect me to get all teary-eyed and soppy, because that’s not going to happen. If she insists on coming, then she’s just going to have to take what she gets and like it.”

 

“Oh, _please_. You? Teary-eyed and soppy? I’d pay to see that. Big money.” She no longer feels intimidated and she finds that Rebecca appreciates her sense of humor in much the same way Erin appreciates hers.

 

“Go win the lottery and we’ll talk.” It’s accompanied with a wry grin, but her face turns serious in a matter of moments. After a lengthy pause, she speaks. “I didn’t expect to like you. In fact, I expected to despise you. Jillian doesn’t make these kinds of connections often, and as her…mentor, I was positive that you were just going to take from her. This world has taken so much from her already, and I can’t abide by flippant girls who flash their smiles and expect to be doted upon. But you’re good for her, I think. You’re good for each other.” Apart from doing her the service of explaining how she came to be Holtzmann’s mentor, this is the most heartfelt thing Rebecca has ever said to her, and it chokes her up a little. Her exact fears had been that she was taking so much more from Holtz than she was giving back, and to hear the exact opposite coming from one of the most important people in Holtzmann’s life sends her soaring. “But if you tell anyone I said that, I will not hesitate to cut you.”

 

*****

 

Gerald is pristine when Holtzmann finishes. She’s managed to capture her grandfather’s loving visage well enough, and the little wheelchair is fully functional. He shines and gleams just like she knew he would, and her goggles fog up a little.

 

“Nice to see you again, old friend.”

 

The only thing left to do is try him out. Holtzmann had designed the image with Erin in mind, but she needs him to be able to do it twice. The programming had been easy enough that she hadn’t required Abby’s assistance, and it was a simple image, just a repetition of a few numbers and letters and lines. Holtz slips the paper into the slot gently beneath him and waits as he does his job. The chemical compounds appear one by one, fluid and sharp. First adrenaline, then dopamine, then serotonin, spiraling out in fractals until Gerald is done, and        Holtzmann now holds a Golden spiral made of love.

 

“So…I’m not a scientist, and you’re gonna hafta explain to me why a bunch of letters and lines and numbers means so much.” Patty stands behind her, and Holtz is going to have to strap her to an alarm system or get her a bell or something because she is too quiet for her own good.

 

“Whelp, Patts, my dear, this is the Fibonacci Sequence translated into the Golden Spiral and all this-“ Gesturing to the individual compounds. “-that’s love.” Patty smiles, big and bright, and Holtzmann grins back.

 

“Man, you science-y types are weird.”

 

 *****

 

It’s a grand affair, Holtz making sure Gerald’s antique inkwell is full, his fountain pen functioning properly, and the chrome of his chair shining more brightly than Polaris. She wheels him along the sterile halls of the hospital, and for the first time in weeks, she maybe feels a little flash of hope. Not for some kind of miracle, or a sudden cure, but that she can finally communicate to the two most important people in her life what she’s been trying to all along. She’s prepared, had been for weeks, but there’s still apprehension making every step that much more difficult to take. She pushes it away, hoping against all hope that this works. That she’ll be loved.

As she approaches the door slowly, she can hear Rebecca’s sharp voice filtering through the semi-closed doorway.

 

“When did you say she was going to be here? Punctuality was never her strong suit.”

 

“Oh, pipe down over there.” Erin’s been here for hours, prepping for Holtzmann’s inevitably dramatic entrance.

 

“And your office hours sucked.” She says, finally entering. There’s a thousand-watt grin on her face and Erin can see Gorin visibly brighten.

 

“They sucked because I was always in the lab, trying to stop you from irradiating the entire campus.” She retorts. Still, Holtz stands awkwardly near the door, her sheet-covered cart bumping reassuringly against her jittery leg.

 

“There’s scorch marks on that sheet.” Rebecca observes dryly. Erin snorts and Holtzmann smiles.

 

“We had an…incident.” She locks eyes with Erin and maybe everything is going to be okay.

 

“Well, get on with it. If you’re here to make some grand gesture to your not-girlfriend here, or ask for my blessing or something, it’s not like we’ve got all the time in the world.” There’s an awkward, pregnant pause as Erin waits in horror for this whole thing to dissolve into chaos, but Holtz and Rebecca dissolve into laughter instead.

 

“Did you just make a pun? About your own death?” Holtz giggles. Erin is going into shock. Or hallucinating.

 

“Taking a page out of your playbook, Jillian.” The atmosphere is no longer tense, and Holtz is ready to let Gerald do his thing.

 

“As you both know, I’m not the best with words…” Erin and Rebecca simultaneously roll their eyes. “So I’m not going to talk.” She whips the sheet off the cart and flicks a hidden switch. As Gerald whirs to life, she addresses Rebecca. “His name is Gerald.” Silence stretches on, broken only by small clicks and the rustle of paper as the automaton writes, wheeling around in what is quite literally the perfect spiral.

 

“So what’s new with you?” Rebecca asks Erin, mirth coloring her voice as she breaks the lingering silence.

 

“Oh, not much. Just got done re-wiring my lightning shotgun. You know how it goes.” They’re grinning like hyenas, and Holtzmann knows. Everything is going to be okay. She moves quickly to change the thick paper once Gerald tweets that he’s done. The minutes tick away as they converse, before he chirps happily away once more. Armed only with science and love, Holtzmann takes a deep breath.

 

“The reason I’ve called you all here today…” She begins dramatically as the other two snort in tandem. “Is because I needed Gerald here to tell you what I’m not that great at saying.” She hands the glittering paper first to Rebecca, then to Erin, and waits. It’s love translated in the purest form she knows and it’s all she can give them. “Dr. Gorin, you were there when I needed you and Erin, we need each other, and I just-“

 

“Jillian, shut up and come give me a hug.” Rebecca’s voice is thick and her eyes are glittering, and as Jillian Holtzmann embraces the closest thing she’s ever had to a mother, Erin can only say,

 

“Ha! Now I need to go buy a lottery ticket.” Rebecca smiles from over Holtz’s shoulder and then discretely flips her off. Erin simply giggles and receives it as if she were being blown a kiss. Then she regards her own drawing, golden ink twinkling just like the stars Holtz had built for her in a lab, and a she slowly comes to realize what it is, she feels herself tearing up as well.

 

“Oh, Holtz…” It comes out on a whisper.

 

“You two hold me together.” Holtzmann says with finality.

 

 *****

 

The drawing hangs on the wall opposite Rebecca’s bed, and they visit nearly every day. Sometimes Patty and Abby even tag along. They tell her everything, their busts, their breakthroughs (for which she often has great insights) and Holtz has a fabulous time recounting Erin’s building of the DeBye shotgun. They tell her about the blackout and the candles, nightlights and childhood fears, and she loves them for it. The weeks go by as she recedes further and further into her fluffy pillows, and visiting hours grow shorter and shorter.

Three weeks later they get called out to a bust for a rather benevolent old lady who seems more confused than aggravated, but the incident still brings up bad memories, so Abby declares the need for a celebration. Erin breaks out the eyeliner and heels again, Holtzmann goes all out in her best suit, and Abby looks like she belongs on the cover of ‘Vogue’. Patty stuns them all though, descending the stairs regally in a flaming red dress made of fire for the Goddess Aphrodite.

 

“Gon’ get me some _tonight_!” She cackles as they file into a limo (on the mayor’s dime, of course) and roll up to the club like a gaggle of celebrities. There’s even a carpet to walk, which they do, because they really are celebrities.

They’re seated in a massive booth and for once they just sit and gossip and drink like the family they are. Erin determines that Holtz has clearly had a substantial amount of whiskey when she breaks out the flowery prose.

 

“Erin dances like a freakin’ Goddess, guys!” She announces suddenly, which elicits three confused glances because everyone (including Erin) knows that Erin cannot dance. “I don’t mean dancing, I mean during busts. It’s like the whole thing is choreographed and I’ve got her back and she’s got mine.” No one has thee heart to tell her that’s the point of working in pairs. “But seriously, Erin, you’re like…the Fibonacci to my sequence, the lightning to my shotgun…” Abby makes a gagging noise and Patty kicks her under the table. Holtz makes eye contact with Erin directly, and as amusing as this unprompted tirade may be, she feels her pulse quicken a little. “You’re like my soul-“

 

“Anything else I can get you ladies?” A bartender pops out of nowhere, interrupting the flow. Holtzmann fixes him with a deathly glare.

 

“Excuse me, _sir_ , but this is my _soulmate_ , and I have everything I need, thank you very _much_!”

A thousand sound booths could not contain the combined force of Abby and Patty’s laughter, and Erin finds her head in her hands very quickly. The young man looks thoroughly abused, and Holtz looks very pleased with herself.

 

“Can we just get two gin and tonics, please?” Erin asks as he disappears instantaneously. Abby and Patty are still bowed over with laughter, beating their fists on the table and leaning heavily on each other. But Holtz just looks at Erin in wonderment, a look of awe plastered across her face.

 

“That’s what I was gonna order! It’s like you read my mind!” Erin just kisses her cheek and intertwines their fingers under the table, because now, she believes it. 

 

“I didn’t have to read your mind. I’m your soulmate, remember?” Patty chokes on her Cosmo and Abby falls out of the booth.

 

“We’re leaving, you disgusting love-freaks!” She gurgles before bodily dragging Patty out onto the dance floor. “And don’t think I don’t see you holding hands!” Erin just laughs and kisses Holtz’s knuckles.

 

Things aren’t okay. They’re good.

 

 

Epilogue:

 

                There’s a particular cemetery in New York, hidden away between gardens and skyscrapers where many of the graves are just as old as the city itself. But it’s Holtzmann’s second favorite place in the world because, if Erin tags along, she can have the three people she’s loved most in the world all within a few feet. Gerald and Rebecca, side by side, and Erin and Jills, all together like some sort of Frankenfamily, and it puts fire in her heart and sunlight in her veins. She picnics with her soulmate in the grass and talks her family through her latest inventions, and their most amazing busts, and once (when she comes alone) how she’s forging a ring out of titanium for Erin, the strongest living person she knows, and she’s happy. So happy that it floods from her every pore and fizzles every time she and Erin touch; it drips from her very being like a leaking glow stick, except her light never runs out.

Some days, though, they don’t visit, and when the sun is waning and you look at just the right moment, you can see the flashing clicks of two Fibonacci spirals, engraved in silver and gold on the headstones, shining out into the city, the spirals that hold the world together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference:  
> I once woke up in a running bathtub somewhere, still fully clothed; breathing through a shot does take away most of the burn; I bought a copy of Gray's Anatomy for this and I love it; Gerald is a mixture between my great-grandmother who had childhood-polio and my grandfather who taught me everything I know about words; and a huge thanks to a shining ray of sunshine named Cass. I accept your marriage proposal.


End file.
